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King of the Hill: ACC Football Power Rankings (Week 13)

By CardiacHill
NCAA Football: Pittsburgh at Virginia Tech Peter Casey-USA TODAY Sports

Here’s how I rank the conference teams based on what we’ve seen so far. Number in parentheses is the team’s ranking last week.

  1. (1) Clemson (11-0) - Bye
  2. (2) Virginia Tech (8-3) - 28-0 win over Pitt
  3. (4) Virginia (8-3) - 55-27 win over Liberty
  4. (3) Miami (6-5) - 30-24 loss to Florida International
  5. (6) Louisville (7-4) - 56-34 win over Syracuse
  6. (7) Wake Forest (8-3) - 39-27 win over Duke
  7. (5) Pitt (7-4) - Lost to Virginia Tech
  8. (8) Florida State (6-5) - Bye
  9. (10) North Carolina (5-6) - 56-7 win over Mercer
  10. (9) Boston College (5-6) - 40-7 loss to Notre Dame
  11. (12) Syracuse (4-7) - Lost to Louisville
  12. (13) Duke (4-7) - Lost to Wake Forest
  13. (14) Georgia Tech (3-8) - 28-26 win over NC State
  14. (11) North Carolina State (4-7) - Lost to Georgia Tech

I mostly feel pretty good about the first ten teams, though I think you could make a case for making some changes.

I know some would rank Miami lower after their terrible loss and, ideally, I’d like to do that. The problem is they’ve beaten all three teams they’ve played that are directly beneath them (Louisville, Pitt, and Florida State) and have a similar record to all. The obvious answer to some would be to at least put Wake ahead of them but with the Demon Deacons losing head-to-head to Louisville and having no impressive wins, I’m not quite ready to do that.

There’s more trouble with the bottom four teams since they’re all starting to beat each other. I moved NC State to the bottom after their most recent loss to Georgia Tech this weekend. I was tempted to keep them at No. 11 since they have the same record as Syracuse and beat them head to head. But that win was also way back in early October and the Tech loss is more recent. Plus, NC State has just looked very bad since then and with all of the last four teams beating each other, there’s no way to solely go by head-to-head and we’ve got to take a closer look at the more recent results.

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