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An All-important Bowl Season

By Matthew Osborne
SouthernPigskin.com
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For the overall well-being of the conference, this bowl season needs to be a surprisingly positive one for the ACC.

By now, we are all very familiar with the reputation of the ACC as a football conference nationally.

Needless to say, the conference’s reputation is not stellar.

The negative thoughts towards ACC football certainly did not spawn without legitimate cause. For years, the ACC has struggled in a number of capacities. Most notably, the conference has failed to produce a legitimate national title contender and has performed poorly in its non-conference endeavors.

The ACC’s non-conference performance has been particularly dismal in postseason play. Since 2005, the conference has a record of just 19-31 in bowl games, with no seasons ending with a winning record in postseason competition.

Using Las Vegas betting lines as a guide for this bowl season, it appears that things won’t be getting better any time soon.

Of the ACC’s six bowl participants, only Virginia Tech and Florida State are favored to win their bowl games, against Rutgers and Northern Illinois respectively.

Clemson, Duke, Georgia Tech and NC State are all projected to lose their upcoming bowl games, with Duke and Georgia Tech being more than touchdowns underdogs against their respective opponents.

While Vegas betting lines are certainly not a perfect indication of how the contests will end up, they are usually the best barometer for predicting what will happen during bowl season.

If the Vegas betting lines do indeed hold true, the ACC will only slip further into the abyss on a national scale.

It is already bad enough that the conference was only able to get six teams eligible for postseason play (granted, North Carolina and Miami had the number of wins needed for bowl eligibility, but were held out due to postseason bans) and that one of those teams required a special exemption from the NCAA in order to qualify (Georgia Tech), but another overwhelmingly disappointing bowl campaign will just add fuel to the fire of the conference’s detractors.

In every sport, there is always one player, team or conference that seems to rise up and perform past expectations in any given season.

While that is the case, year after year, the ACC has painfully failed to surpass even the most moderate of expectations. In fact, the majority of times the conference has vastly underperformed what were tempered expectations to begin with.

For the overall well-being of the conference, this bowl season needs to be a surprisingly positive one for the ACC.

One successful bowl season will not make the ACC football jokes disappear completely, but it will generate some positive momentum for a conference which has been steadily declining on the recruiting trail over the past decade.

Here is to hoping that this will finally be a bowl season for the ACC to remember.
 

Matthew Osborne - With an extensive background in both writing and high school recruiting, Matt serves as the Editor and Director of Recruiting for Southern Pigskin. Once serving as the South Region Senior Scout for a national scouting service, Matt is very familiar with the top football prospects in the south. If it is a weekend in the fall, you can rest assured that Matt is on the road watching some of the top high school and college games in the region. To keep up with all of the latest recruiting news in the south, be sure to follow Matt on Twitter: @MattOsborneSP. You can email him at matt@southernpigskin.com.