What are your thoughts on the ACC this season?

I have a weird feeling FSU is going to beat LSU which will lead to "FLORIDA STATE IS BACK" talk then immediately lose to Louisville leading to Baton Rouge melting down.

Also, I know little about gambling but if the O/U is 6, if they land directly on 6, is it a push and you get your cash back? If so, I'd take that VaTech number all day. ODU, Liberty, Wofford, Georgia Tech and Duke are almost all locks, they whip UVA even when UVA is the better team, and they haven't failed to win 6 games in like 25 years.

I have not paid a single ounce of attention to the ACC this off season... here are my thoughts based on life and experience.

Miami ... preseason excitement. We're back baby!! New coach. Big early September matchup. QB stinks. Oh. Lose. Oh. Eh Miami.  They finish the season in the middle of okay. Nobody cares bowl. But ... hey, looking ahead to 23... amirite??  Get excited... we're back baby!!!

Florida State ... Are they currently in the process of firing their head coach? Did they just fire their head coach? Are they going to fire this coach? It's all so confusing. War chop.

NC State ... lookout bottom feeders and whoever else NC State will schedule in their non conference games!  Then lookout terrible bottom feeding ACC teams that NC State will rack up wins on!! Somehow NC State has 9 wins going into November and Chuck D'amato has got his swagger back!! Cue up 3 straight losses. Oh well.

Virginia Tech ... loses to another 1AA team. "Well, this is finally the end of Virginia Tech," they say again for the Xth straight year. Next year, Virginia Tech is a Top 25 team!

North Carolina / Syracuse / Pitt / BC play football games at 12PM on various Saturdays and I'm able to take naps as a result. Thank you for your service.

Clemson ... ACC Champions.

They suck at football.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but if Clemson played in any other P5 conference, they would average two losses a year, and I'm not talking about how the conferences used to be, I'm taking realignment into consideration. 

In the Big12 Oklahoma State would be a tough game most years. Baylor, Iowa State, TCU, K-State, West Virginia, and maybe Texas Tech would pull off a win at least once every 5 years. 

In the Pac12 Oregon, Utah, and Washington would play them tough every year. Arizona State, and Stanford would probably win twice every 5 years. Arizona & Colorado would probably win once every 5 years. 

Very interested in seeing Miami and Josh Gattis.  How it compares to last year's Michigan team and this year's.

I've referenced this elsewhere but Clemson was something like 5-2 in one score games last year so they were "lucky" in a down year for them; if that defense takes a step back without Venables I could see 10.5 being a hard number to hit even given how soft that schedule is.

I think a ton of teams are going to finish with 6-7 wins this year, and that includes Miami and Pitt who are expected to be better than that.  Pitt had more talent than just Pickett but they lost a top receiver in the country to USC and Narduzzi has been profoundly mediocre there since he arrived so one good year may not be a pattern.  Miami is a whole new coach and system and early Gattis wasn't all that pretty at UM with at least as much talent, if not more.   Their defense should be better but Oregon under Cristobal was one really great year in 2019 (admittedly they only played 2 ranked teams all year in the end) and relative mediocrity in a bad conference.  I don't know if the ACC is much different than late stage Pac-12 but it's not a slam dunk they'll be lights out.

The sleeper to me in NC State, a program that always finds a way to stub its toe but has good talent and a nice schedule.  FSU may also bounce back a bit to decent bowl contention but I absolutely think they're going to lose a couple of games that'll drive their faithful crazy.

I am curious to see where UVA falls this season.  Bronco retired kind of out of nowhere.  They have a really good QB in Armstrong and Clemson's OC as the head coach.  

They could be an interesting team.

Clemson in the ACC is sort of like Oklahoma and the Big-12.  You can't tell how good they are because the rest of the conference is so weak a 10-win season is sort of table stakes.  Now, in the case of Clemson - they've fielded some really solid teams and so the "undefeated" was legitimate.  With Oklahoma it was less the case.  Beyond that I guess I have no opinion other than I hope Miami does poorly because I've hated them since the 80's.

I hope the ones that play Notre Dame can put the leprechaun in his rain poncho.

I think Miami wins 10.  Won't lose to Pitt, regardless.

Can anyone explain to me why everyone is so freaking excited with Cristobal being at Miami? I guess with Miami when you've been so bad for so long you're happy to take a guy with some results, but when you see how Oregon just completely imploded down the stretch, Cristobal loses a lot of his luster. They didn't just get beat by Utah. They got shellacked. Twice. And it wasn't like the season was over in either situation. They had both their CFP and Pac-12 title hopes on the line, and if I didn't know any better, it just seemed like they quit. Is there reason to believe Cristobal will be better at Miami? Maybe there are extenuating circumstances I don't know about, but if his teams quit at Oregon, will they not at Miami? 

As for the rest of the ACC, Clemson will probably be champions again, but they lost both coordinators and still have no answer at QB right now. At least not an answer that gets them back to where they're used to being. 

FSU is a dumpster fire until proven otherwise, although as someone else in this thread mentioned, it wouldn't shock me in the slightest to see them beat LSU, and for a week ESPN goes on this huge "THE NOLES ARE BACK" campaign, and then FSU loses to Louisville the following week and begins to implode the rest of the way. Few teams in America have embodied "doing less with more" the last 5-6 years more than Florida State has. All the talent in the world and they can barely even make bowl games. That's a culture problem if I've ever seen one, and it seems to transcend the coaches they hire. 

Wake Forest could be interesting to watch just based off its offense. I don't know much about them but it looks like their offense was really good last year and they have a lot of guys coming back. That Clemson matchup at home on Sept 24th could be really interesting. 

The rest of the conference looks pretty blah. My guess? You've got a 10-2 Clemson champion that is improved from last season but misses out on the playoff because it is clearly lacking the Watson/Lawrence type of QB that has annually put them over the top. Miami will probably go 6-6 or 7-5. Norvell will be out of Tallahassee before the end of the season and FSU backs up the Brinks truck to Meyer's house in a desperate last shot at attaining glory. And to stick it to Florida fans. 

The rest of the conference cannibalizes itself into a bunch of 6-6 to 8-4 teams. 

Reading this is the most thought I've given to the ACC

The conference sucks. My thoughts run no deeper than that.

I look at this top to bottom and have no idea why any ND fan would want to remain in this conference.

Stick to basketball. 

Wow, is Florida really expected to be that bad?