As Syracuse football suffered its second loss of the 2024 season on Thursday night at undefeated Pittsburgh, and other week-nine action in the Atlantic Coast Conference transpired on Friday and Saturday, it seems that four league members might be distancing themselves from the pack in the race for a conference crown.
Granted, there is still a lot of football left to be played in the 2024 regular season, so things can ebb and flow within the ACC's pecking order.
With the league expanding to 17 members in football through the additions of California, SMU and Stanford, the ACC eliminated its divisions for the 2024 term. The top two squads in the conference at the end of the regular season will play for an ACC championship on Saturday, Dec. 7, at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C.
The winner of the ACC will earn a berth to the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff ("CFP"). We'll have to see how everything pans out nationally over the course of the current campaign, but it's certainly possible that a second league school could receive one of the seven at-large bids to the CFP.
Syracuse football and its conference peers are jockeying for position in the ACC standings.
Following week-nine contests, a quartet of groups remains undefeated in ACC competition: They are No. 5 Miami, No. 8 Clemson, No. 17 Pittsburgh and No. 20 SMU. Both the Hurricanes and the Panthers have yet to lose at all in the 2024 season, while the Tigers and the Mustangs each have one non-conference setback.
All four of those ACC schools are on a roll, with each of them having won at least five encounters in a row. Further down the league standings, two teams have two losses at this juncture in the current term, and they are the Orange and Duke, although both of them have two setbacks in conference play.
Another ACC squad to monitor is Virginia Tech, which travels to the JMA Wireless Dome to face Syracuse football this Saturday, Nov. 2. The Hokies have captured three straight victories and are 3-1 in league affairs, while Virginia Tech sports a 5-3 overall mark.
Beyond Miami, Clemson, Pittsburgh, SMU and Virginia Tech, every other ACC member has at least two conference losses. Does this mean that the ACC championship game will likely feature two of these five aforementioned squads?
Perhaps. But to reiterate, the 2024 regular season has numerous games remaining on its collective docket in the ACC and around the country.
For the 'Cuse (5-2, 2-2 in the ACC), it will battle both the Hokies and Miami at home. The Orange's other home contest that is left on the 2024 calendar will be versus UConn, while Syracuse football will also head to Boston College and California.
Can the 'Cuse get to Charlotte in early December? I think that's unlikely. The Orange, in my humble opinion, would have to win out to finish at 10-2 overall and 6-2 in ACC play to have any sort of shot at making the ACC title encounter.
That's a tough ask, and even under that sort of scenario, my assumption is that two other league schools could still finish higher than Syracuse football in the conference standings.
National pundits, throughout the course of the 2024 season, continue to opine that the Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten Conference are head and shoulders above other leagues, including the ACC. That might be true, but at the same time, multiple teams within the ACC are competing at an ultra-high level these days.