For some off-season football reading, we want to look at the ACC’s 10 best Out of Conference wins of the 2020s. For the health of the ACC, the list needs to improve, but we did see some significant wins last year as the league took a step in the right direction.
For the previous decade, we ranked the ACC’s 50 biggest OOC wins of the 2010s.
They were some great wins there. That’s for sure. Let’s hope the rest of this decade starts approaching the last decade.
We look at games 6-10 here, and soon we’ll list the top 5.
6. Louisville 42 UCF 35 – September 17, 2021
UCF has become quite a quality football program in recent years. They even opened the season with a win over Boise State. This game on Friday night had one of the highlight finishes of the year for an ACC team. Louisville returned a tipped pass for a TD with 13 seconds left to win this game in thrilling fashion. UCF went on to have a 9-4 season game with a bowl win over Florida. This was definitely a great win for Louisville in an otherwise uneven year.
7. #22 Miami 25 Appalachian St 23 – September 11, 2021
I never understood why after Miami won this game, people were so critical of Miami. That was a pretty solid Appalachian State team that went 10-4 and a division title. Yea, it was only a 2 point win, but the reality was the Canes were not as good as their top 15 ranking so this was a quality win over a good team.
8. #16 NC State 27 Texas Tech 14 – September 17, 2022
If there was one criticism of Dave Doern during his tenure at NC State was a lack of quality OOC wins. They finally got a noteworthy one against Big 12 opponent Texas Tech. The Red Raiders finished the season 8-5 and won their final 4 games. The win helped the Wolfpack eventually get into the top 10, which set up a gameday matchup with Clemson later in the season. Only one other defense held Texas Tech to 14 points or less the entire season.
9. Syracuse 32 Purdue 29 – September 17, 2022
The Syracuse win over Purdue never got the credit it deserved. The Boilermakers were the Big 10 West Division Champions, and Syracuse ended up as a middle-of-the-pack ACC team. Maybe the ACC had a little depth in 2022? The game itself was a thriller with Orande Gadson II catching a 25-yard from Garrett Shrader. The win was part of a 6-0 start by Syracuse that led to Syracuse and Clemson playing the highest-rated game of the weekend when they faced each other in late October.
10. #23 Clemson 30 South Carolina 0 – November 27, 2021
Clemson’s worst team in nearly a decade went down to Columbia, SC, and thrashed a South Carolina team some felt could knock off the Tigers. This wasn’t an awful South Carolina team as they went 7-6, and were just a couple of scores from a 9-win season. Clemson’s win suggested at the time there was still an enormous gap between the two schools’ football programs. The win was part of the Tiger’s late-season surge that saw them win their final 6 games and finish with their 11th straight 10+ win season.
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