For some off-season football reading, we already looked at the ACC’s 10 best Out of Conference wins of the 2020s. That list improved significantly with last year, but it wasn’t all good for the ACC. A number of image-damaging losses were added last year, and with the good comes the bad.
We ranked the ACC’s 50 biggest OOC wins of the 2010s if you’d like a look at the previous decade.
We start here with games 6-10 and will look at the ACC’s top 5 losses of the current decade in a forthcoming article.
6. Duke 28 UNC-Charlotte 31 – September 3, 2021
UNC-Charlotte won just 5 games in 2021 and went 3-5 in Conference USA, but one of those 5 wins was against a dreadful Duke team that went winless in the ACC. This loss was just the first indication of how truly bad Duke was going to be. Early in the season losses like create a hole for the ACC perceptions that’s hard to dig out of.
7. Georgia Tech 21 Northern Illinois 22 – September 4, 2021
Georgia Tech needed a positive start to the 2021 season to restore confidence in Geoff Collins’s plan in Atlanta. The season was derailed after a disastrous opening game. Northern Illinois was coming off a winless 2020, was an 18 1/2 underdog, and had only won 5 games the previous 2 years. The Jackets looked terrible in this game and turned out to be a terrible team.
8. Georgia Tech 0 Ole Miss 42 – September 17, 2022
Geoff Collins’s crowning achievement at Georgia Tech is producing some of the worst losses in the Yellow Jackets’ proud history, and some of the worst OOC losses of the decade for the ACC. In 2022 Ole Miss got ranked as high as #7 but lost 5 of their last 6 games. They were an OK 8-5 team, but nothing special. On September 17, 2022, they beat Georgia Tech so thoroughly Lane Kiffin had to admit he had to hold back his offense because he felt sorry for Geoff Collins’s coaching status. This one looked more like an organized scrimmage than an actual football game.
9. #4 Clemson 14 Notre Dame 35 – November 5, 2022
Getting on this list isn’t always about losing to the worst teams, it’s also about how the game affects the ACC’s perception. When Clemson headed to South Bend to play Notre Dame, they were in control of their path to the playoffs. Clemson got down 28-0 to a Notre Dame team that couldn’t beat Marshall or a terrible Stanford team at home was a pedestrian 5-3 going into the game. The Tigers were bullied from start to finish. Clemson and the ACC received a lot of bad press after this one.
10. #8 Clemson 30 South Carolina 31 – November 26, 2022
Clemson’s 30-31 loss to South Carolina in 2022 wasn’t so bad because South Carolina was necessarily an awful team. The Gamecocks thrashed a very good Tennessee team the week before and finished in the top 25. Here is the problem your ACC Champion can’t be losing to middle-of-the-pack teams from other power conferences at home. Clemson was heavily favored and controlled most of the game only to collapse in the 4th quarter. I believe this loss set the wheels in motion for Dabo Swinney to start thinking about making staff changes which we saw at the end of the season.
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