College Football 2009 Arrives At Last!

A few thoughts on the opening weekend of the 2009-2010 college football season:

The ACC Opens Weakly

• Last season, I made the argument --successfully, I think-- that the ACC was a good league. Though they didn't have any teams in the national title race, they had about 12 teams (out of 12) that were good enough to go to a bowl game. The #5-12 teams in the ACC would dominate the #7-12 teams in any other league, even though #s 1-4 would struggle. Despite the effectiveness of that reasoning last season, the ACC's national profile took another hit on opening Saturday when most of the teams lost.


• The ACC was 4-6 in games against teams from other leagues Saturday, including 0-3 against teams from BCS automatic-bid conferences.


• The ACC was 0-2 against the NCAA's Football Championship Subdivision ("the minor leagues"), as the University of Virginia got thumped 26-14 *_at_home_* by the College of William & Mary, and Duke got whipped *_also_at_home_* by the defending FCS champion Richmond Spiders.


• Wake Forest fell *_at_home_* to the Baylor Bears, allowing that team to snap its 12-game/3-year road losing streak against BCS squads.


• Virginia Tech, the ACC's flagship school, was beaten by Alabama in Atlanta. The lost by a smaller margin than Clemson did in this game last season, but still, they lost


• Among the ACC's up-and-coming schools, Maryland was massacred 52-13 at Cal, and NC State was shut down *_at_home_* by South Carolina.


• The ACC schools that did win did so against lower division foes, as BC, Clemson, UNC & GaTech beat up on Northeastern, MTSU, The Citadel, and Jacksonville State, respectively.

The Transitive Property

After a glance at the scores over the first half of the season, one may have reason to believe that Florida State is in big trouble as they travel to Georgia Tech for today's featured Atlantic Coast Conference football matchup.

Remember, Florida State was shut down at home by a score of 12-3 at home against Wake Forest on September 20th. Of course, Wake was SMASHED at Maryland on October 18 by a score of 26-0. Maryland, in turn, was brutalized 31-0 by Virginia in Charlottesville on October 4th. That same Virginia team was embarassed 31-3 by Duke in Durham on September 27th. And Duke got stomped 27-0 by Georgia Tech in Atlanta on October 4th. So, if GaTech shut out Duke, which routed Virginia, which shut out Maryland, which shut out Wake, which shut down FlaState; why wouldn't GaTech absolutely annihilate Florida State in their game today?

Well, actually, in this year's ACC there are plenty of good reasons, but... I'll have to save that for another post!