For some off-season football reading, we already looked at the ACC’s 25 best Out-of-conference wins of the 2020s. With good comes the bad, though, and ACC programs need to stop losing games they should win. The media is already against the conference; don’t keep giving them fuel for their narratives.
We ranked the ACC’s 50 biggest OOC wins of the 2010s, if you’d like a look at the previous decade.
Games 1-5 | Games 6-10 | Games 16-20
11. #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.
12. #10 Louisville 31 Kentucky 38 – November 25, 2023
If there was an ACC SEC Rivalry game in 2023, I felt good about it was the Kentucky-Louisville game. Louisville came in 10-1, ranked in the top 10, playing at home, and still had an outside shot at the College Football playoff. Kentucky was 6-5 and had lost 4 of their last 5 games, but they had won the previous 4 games in this rivalry. Arguably the 2nd best team in the ACC, getting beat at home by a middling SEC team is never a good thing. With Florida State needing resume points the next week in the ACCCG, this result didn’t help. Not that it would have mattered in the end, FSU was always going to get jobbed. The fix was in, but it gave the committee just another reason to penalize the Noles.
13. Georgia Tech 27 Bowling Green 38 – September 30, 2023
Georgia Tech won their first bowl game since 2016 and had their first winning record since 2018 in 2024. On September 30, 2023, we weren’t sure what direction the Jackets season would go. MAC team Bowling Green was 1-3 before this game, but after falling behind 14-0, they ran off 38 straight points in running Georgia Tech out of their own stadium. It left a stench reminiscent of the Geoff Collins era. Georgia Tech did recover to make something of their season, but that was one ugly day in Atlanta.
14. Virginia Tech 17 Marshall 24 – September 23, 2023
Virginia Tech had a very similar result to Georgia Tech in losing to a middle-of-the-pack G5 team when they lost to Marshall 24-17, but at least it was more competitive and on the road. I guess. The loss dropped Virginia Tech to 1-3 on the season, as Marshall ran for over 200 yards on the ground. Virginia Tech went 6-3 the rest of the way, but this loss could have completely derailed Virginia Tech’s season. For the Hokies sake, it didn’t.
15. Boston College 24 Northern Illinois 27 (OT) – September 2, 2023
Northern Illinois had already beat Georgia Tech in 2022. In 2023 they added another ACC team to their resume of wins. Northern Illinois finished the season 7-6 (5-3) in the MAC. It set the tone for a shakey 1-3 start for the Boston College season, who then won their next 5 games, BC ended up 7-6 with a bowl win, but this was a bad loss no matter how you slice it. ACC teams losing to middle-of-the-pack MAC teams is always too tough to overcome for the perception of a league.
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