What to Make of ACC Crushing SEC on Rivalry Weekend
Rivalry Week 2014 became less about the teams and more about the conferences Saturday afternoon, when the SEC—the biggest, toughest, haughtiest league in college football—went 0-4 against the supposedly inferior ACC.
It started out at noon, when Louisville beat Kentucky, Clemson beat South Carolina and Georgia Tech beat Georgia, then culminated when Florida State fought off an upset bid from Florida.
The SEC is the undisputed king of college football, and it has been for close to a decade. Whether it deserves to be the king is up for debate—some would argue that the ACC dethroned it in January—but almost every neutral party agrees that it's the class of the sport.
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In which case…what the heck are we supposed to make of Saturday?
Before we ring death knells for the SEC at large, it's important to note that all four of Saturday's losers came from the East division.
SEC fans have been ashamed of the East all season, casting it aside as the redheaded stepchild. Florida was so bad that its head coach "resigned" midseason. South Carolina has been an abject disaster since Week 1. Georgia lost to both of the aforementioned teams.
Missouri won the division after losing at home to Indiana.
"I told the guys, ‘6-6 might be what we are,’" South Carolina head coach Steve Spurrier told reporters after Saturday's loss. "Clemson was better than us. They played better and they coached better. Give those guys credit, they are better than us."
He might as well have been talking about his entire division.
The West was the flag-bearer for the SEC all season, not the East. And nothing about that changed on Saturday. Results from the Egg Bowl and the Iron Bowl will have bearing on the College Football Playoff. Nothing about the East has been CFP-relevant for weeks.
In that vein, then, the most important takeaway from Saturday's results has nothing to do with the SEC at all. Rather, the biggest thing we learned is that the ACC is better than we realized.
(Or, at least, that it's better than most of us realized. Others—shameless self-promotion alert!—saw this coming weeks ago.)
The ACC does not have any truly great teams (sorry, 'Noles), but it is loaded with very good ones.
Florida State is very good on a bad day. Clemson, Georgia Tech and Louisville are very good on most days. Boston College, Duke and Miami are very good on frequent days. Even Virginia Tech won at Ohio State!
On that note, Florida State might be the biggest winner of Week 14. It did not look overly impressive against Florida, which missed two field goals in a five-point loss, but the strength of its 12-0 record can no longer be disparaged for its conference.
Missouri is 10-2 and will be argued about as a playoff contender if it beats Alabama in the SEC Championship Game. It is a massive underdog to actually crack the Top Four, but by winning the nation's best conference, it would have a strong rhetorical case.
No longer, though, can 10-2 in the SEC East be argued as analogous to 12-0 in the ACC. No longer can anything be argued as analogous to 12-0 in the ACC. Florida State is the only undefeated team in the country, and that no longer comes with an asterisk.
#GoACC…but for real.
Follow Brian Leigh on Twitter: @BLeighDAT
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