Give @MattZemek a twitter follow and check out his musings on college sports at https://www.patreon.com/Zemek.
ACC QUESTION of the WEEK : Which ACC football team will be the biggest surprise in 2019?
Before every season in every sport, human beings wonder which team (or athlete) will surprise everyone. This is a natural and constant part of our attempts to make sense of sports, grappling with the possibility that someone will rise above our expectations.
In ACC football this year, is there a team which stands out as a surprise candidate?
This might be the truly surprising element of 2019 ACC football: There is no surprise.
Would it surprise anyone THAT MUCH if Virginia won the ACC Coastal? The Cavaliers have better, more seasoned talent compared to past seasons. Miami and Virginia Tech are not paragons of reliability.
Would it surprise anyone all that much if Miami tumbled, given all the transitions that program has had to make, and given the need for the Canes to prove that they can get good quarterback play, the most elusive aspect of the post-Ken Dorsey era in Coral Gables?
If you know what Virginia Tech is going to do this year, in light of all the disruptions and distortions which have occurred under Justin Fuente, go to Las Vegas and become rich. You know a lot more than I do.
Good luck figuring out Pitt, Duke, North Carolina, and Georgia Tech this year. Coaching changes, personnel changes, and a volatile ACC Coastal create a world of uncertainty.
Surprises emerge from having a reasonably clear sense of what might happen. The ACC — other than Clemson being great and Louisville being in for a long first year under Scott Satterfield — is a playground of unpredictability. There is no house built on rock other than the one in Clemson. This is the conference of sand and fog this year.
The non-Clemson, non-Louisville portions of the Atlantic are little clearer than the Coastal. Maybe Syracuse will remain the No. 2 team in the Atlantic (I think there’s a decent chance), but Syracuse falling a few games this year would hardly rate as a shock. Programs have to establish themselves over multiple seasons before they earn extra levels of trust.
Florida State is in an in-between place. The Seminoles could thrive. They could crash and burn. They could fall somewhere in between those polarities. None of it would come across as mind-blowing.
Wake Forest, Boston College, North Carolina State — they all could go 8-4. They all could go 6-6. Would any of those results truly confound you?
Human beings sometimes think they have to provide an answer. Sometimes, the best answer is to say you don’t really know. Sometimes, the best answer is to say, “Actually, no, there isn’t a surprise in store for us.”
So it is with the 2019 ACC on the gridiron.
Make you follow the All Sports Discussion Twitter account at @AllSportsDACC and please like our Facebook Page
Leave a Reply