So it shall be for 2020, for the first time in Notre Dame football’s storied history a conference championship trophy is available to be won. The Atlantic Coast Conference recently unveiled a 10-game schedule for all of its members this fall, including Notre Dame who will be taking part fully in the festivities. For 2020, there are no divisions and the top two teams will meet in the ACC Championship at the conclusion of the regular season.
If we ever get there, of course.
Now, this unique set up does highlight how scheduling could affect the race for the league trophy (which I’m told looks like THIS) and the way in which SoS has been weaved by the ACC. For example, Duke, Louisville, North Carolina, and NC State do not face Clemson in the regular season. That’s kind of important!
Pre-season SP+ Rankings for ACC (2020)
#3 Clemson (4)
#12 Notre Dame (19)
#17 North Carolina (30)
#23 Miami (33)
#26 Florida State (58)
#32 Virginia Tech (38)
#41 Louisville (63)
#42 Pittsburgh (49)
#44 Virginia (44)
#58 Georgia Tech (111)
#62 NC State (94)
#69 Duke (68)
#71 Boston College (92)
#81 Wake Forest (57)
#95 Syracuse (77)
2019 final SP+ rankings in parentheses.
Take these rankings with a grain of salt as SP+ tends to heavily overvalue returning experience. Let’s take Georgia Tech as our case. That’s a team that was 3-9 last year, -1.04 in YPP differential, and basically near the bottom nationally in every statistical category. I’m not sure even the most determined Yellow Jackets fan believes their team will be slightly above average in 2020 while making an absurd 53-spot jump in the SP+ rankings.
The ACC has to love the way these projections look, don’t you think? SP+ has 7 teams making at least a 10+ spot jump up the rankings with aforementioned Georgia Tech joining North Carolina, Florida State, Louisville, NC State, and Boston College for a combined 173 spots better than 2019. That doesn’t seem realistic at all that so many ACC teams are going to basically max out their 2020 ceilings, but we’ll see.
Nevertheless, I’m using the pre-season SP+ rankings as the basis for our 2020 ACC schedule strength metric.
Toughest Home Schedules
#1 Wake Forest
#2 Florida State
#3 Georgia Tech
#4 Boston College
#5 Miami
#6 Virginia Tech
#7 Duke
#8 Notre Dame
#9 Pittsburgh
#10 NC State
#11 Louisville
#12 Virginia
#13 Clemson
#14 North Carolina
#15 Syracuse
Toughest Road Schedules
#1 Syracuse
#2 Virginia
#3 Pittsburgh
#4 Florida State
#5 Clemson
#6 Miami
#7 Louisville
#8 NC State
#9 North Carolina
#10 Boston College
#11 Virginia Tech
#12 Notre Dame
#13 Duke
#14 Georgia Tech
#15 Wake Forest
Toughest Overall ACC Schedules
#1 Florida State
#2 Wake Forest
#3 Miami
#4 Boston College
#5 Pittsburgh
#6 Virginia
#7 Georgia Tech
#8 Virginia Tech
#9 Syracuse
#10 Clemson
#10 Louisville
#12 NC State
#13 Duke
#14 Notre Dame
#15 North Carolina
It sure seems like the ACC wants North Carolina to do well! The Tar Heels miss Clemson, plus the other 2 higher-ceiling teams from the ‘other’ division (in normal parlance) in Florida State and Louisville. Additionally, they miss Pittsburgh who they would normally face in their division if this were a regular college football season.
Notre Dame certainly can’t feel hard done by how the schedules have played out. The home slate is pretty challenging if Florida State or Louisville get better in the first and second year of their new head coaches, respectively. The road schedule is entirely manageable, though. Folks like Georgia Tech, North Carolina, or Pitt to get better but as a whole these 5 road teams did go 32-32 last year. It wouldn’t be shocking to see 2 out of those 3 struggle relative to these expectations.
Syracuse has a hilariously difficult road schedule (if playing on the road will even mean that much in 2020) featuring the top 3 teams in pre-season SP+ and 5 out of the top 8 overall. In turn, the Orange do have the easiest home schedule with Georgia Tech (no, seriously) projected to be the toughest opponent.
A lot of people wanted to see a matchup between Notre Dame and Miami, unfortunately that won’t happen at least during the regular season. Despite missing the Irish, the Hurricanes have to play the next 9 projected toughest teams.
Poor Wake Forest has the toughest home schedule but also the easiest road schedule. Their home side is so stocked they nearly have the toughest schedule overall.
There’s virtually no break for Florida State who we have with the toughest overall schedule. They don’t play the projected 3 easiest teams. They play the top 4 toughest teams. If they had Virginia Tech thrown in there instead of say NC State this would’ve been barbaric. Unlike the Tar Heels, I guess the ACC is making Florida State truly earn it in 2020.
Great writeup. 9 teams in the top 44 probably makes for some mayhem and fun results. It’ll be interesting to see what home/road splits even mean, as I’m sure you’re aware Eric in European soccer in empty stadiums the early data seemed to show no advantage for the “home” team and a better-than-normal chance for teams to pull off a road win. It would be interesting if that continues.
So maybe, hope against hope, a team like Miami or Pitt can beat Clemson in Death Valley since it won’t really be Death Valley. Tiebreakers would be pretty fun if Notre Dame, Clemson and UNC all ended up 9-1.
NO NAVY THIS YEAR.
2020 Schedule for the Irish:
9/12 Duke
9/19 Western Michigan
9/26 at Wake Forest
10/10 Florida State
10/17 Louisville
10/24 at Pitt
10/31 at Georgia Tech
11/7 Clemson
11/14 at Boston College
11/28 at North Carolina
12/5 Syracuse
Kinda rough getting Clemson 5th out of 6 straight weeks of playing, but at least it’s in November
EDIT: Just looked at Clemson’s schedule, the ND game is 6th of 6
https://twitter.com/PatrickEngel_/status/1291361333653508098?s=20
I’m really surprised we kept W Michigan over Navy. I’m also surprised they could move the GA Tech game date…does that mean it’s no longer going to be at the Falcons’ stadium? Wake is still at the Panthers’, but it was kept apparently because it’s some kind of Duke Mayonnaise Kick-off.
I’m surprised too. The Capital Gazette (Annapolis) newspaper that had the first report the game was off seemed to list the ACC decision to not allow members to play in non-ACC states as a major reason the game is off. Which makes no sense that Notre Dame couldn’t play on the freakin’ US Naval Academy in a state that used to be an ACC state, but whatever.
So it may have been as simple as Navy didn’t want to move the game yet again to play the game in Indiana (an “ACC state” this year)? That’s a guess by me. Or maybe the schedule just didn’t work. The ACC gave ND 9/19 as their “plus 1” date. Navy has Tulane scheduled for that day (who knows if it stays). Maybe the scheduling just didn’t line up?
Seems like they coulda/shoulda figured out a way to retain the game if both sides really wanted, maybe at this point a little bit of both of them were just like “meh, catch ya next year” given all the changes and uncertainly around.
I suspect your last paragraph is accurate. They’ve already gone through a lot of hoops and probably just didn’t feel like going through another.
I suspect it was the need to move the Navy game plus already being contractually on-the-hook to WMU (pretty hard to try to exercise a force majeure for that game when you’re playing a bunch of other games) made keeping the latter clearly the lower-cost option. They probably effectively bought off Navy from issues about losing the game today by extending the series to 2032.
Agree it very likely could have happened if they really wanted it to, but that would not have been the path of least resistance.
Plus, while it is easy for us to say that they should just switch and make this year an ND home game and next year a Navy home game, that throws a wrench into the number of home games for the teams each year and it might lead to not enough games for NBC.
The GT game is indeed at Bobby Dodd now. They announced that within the last week, I think.
Couldn’t be happier to see FSU and Miami in the top end of hardest schedules.