Why ACC teams need to make College Football Playoff case — before it’s too late

Two months ago, if someone had proposed that Georgia Tech would be the ACC’s top candidate for the College Football Playoff, the gloom and doom would be palpable. And maybe, as the end of October nears, it is.

The Rambling Wreck went into Saturday’s home game against Syracuse a perfect 7-0, even if they have played only one ranked team, and that was middling Clemson. There’s more than a little buzz around the Yellow Jackets, who have taken care of business and grasped the opportunity the rest of the ACC has presented them by — and there’s no other way to say this — stinking it up.

Miami tripped over its own shoelaces weeks ahead of schedule, dropping an eminently winnable home game to Louisville. Congratulations, Canes: You’re the ACC’s only other at-large contender at the moment.

In a little over a week, after next weekend’s games, the CFP selection committee will release its first set of rankings, a generally useless exercise in terms of predicting how things will actually end up, occasionally offering some insight into the thinking of that year’s committee but usually just a shiny object to occupy a news cycle or two.

Beyond Georgia Tech and Miami, the ACC is unlikely to be a major topic of conversation.

Virginia’s path to 11-1 and the ACC title game is wide open, the early loss to N.C. State technically a nonconference game, but has a lot of work to do. Louisville has the win over Miami to its credit, but lost to Virginia and still has to play Clemson and SMU. As for the Mustangs, early losses to Baylor and TCU probably make an at-large berth a bridge too far, although wins over Miami and Louisville would go a long way toward making committee members forget.

Pittsburgh, Duke and California each went into the weekend with one ACC loss, but their only path to the CFP is by winning the ACC title. There’s not much meat left on those bones.

As for the rest of the usual suspects? Florida State beat Alabama and decided it was done for the season. (As far as the CFP is concerned, the Seminoles are.) Clemson is struggling through another season of ordinariness. The aura Dabo Swinney built around the program is gone. Howard’s Rock is just a rock. And the 33rd NFL team went into the weekend tied for the 15th — and last — ACC team. Only North Carolina boosters with more money than sense expected anything else.

Meanwhile, early season contenders elsewhere have fallen apart. Penn State. Texas. LSU. Basketball schools like Indiana and Vanderbilt have seized the opportunity. So has Georgia Tech. But there’s an unusual power vacuum at the top the ACC hasn’t fully exploited.

So once again, the ACC is facing the possibility of another year at the CFP kids’ table. SMU and Clemson were 11th and 12th out of 12 last year, and one stumble from Georgia Tech or another stumble from Miami could leave the ACC with only its champion. Analytically speaking, the ACC is more likely to get two teams into the field than one or three, although things would get really interesting if both Virginia and the Louisville-SMU winner won out.

Pre-expansion, the ACC champion in a year like this was going to be fighting not to be the fifth wheel in a four-team playoff, as happened in the final three years of that format. Even this 12-team playoff may not have much room for the ACC if its teams aren’t going to step forward and claim spots. The deck is already stacked in favor of the SEC and Big Ten as they try to secure superior status in future expansions; if the ACC can’t make a more competitive case for itself, it risks playing itself right into football irrelevance.

This was always a pivotal season in that respect, amid the simmering debate over the future of the CFP and whether the SEC and Big Ten will be able to lock down multiple automatic bids at the expense of the ACC and the Big 12, and while the fight goes on in the boardroom, the ACC has not done itself any favors on the field.

Clemson, Miami and SMU all went into the season with the kind of hype and expectations that pave the way toward the playoff. Only Miami has come close to meeting those expectations, and still dropped a home game as the No. 2-ranked team. Georgia Tech gets eternal credit for forcing its way into the conversation, but no one else in the ACC has come close yet. The ACC still needs someone else — Virginia, Louisville, SMU — to make a case.

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