The ACC has so many 6+ win teams because the SEC and ACC only play 8 conference games. If you play 1 OOC P5 game a year (like most teams do, if they play any at all) that means you’re still playing 1/4 of your games against G5 or FCS teams. You can have a losing conference record and very easily make a bowl game with that setup. The B1G, Big 12, and PAC-12 each play 9 conference games, and most play an additional P5/ND/BYU game on top of that. Meaning you’ve only got 1-2 non P5 games making it tougher for teams in the bottom half of the conference to make a bowl game.
Since 2016 (when the other 3 P5 conferences all went to 9 conf games) the ACC and SEC have had more losing teams make bowls
2016
- ACC - 4
- SEC - 4
- B1G - 2
- Big 12 - 2
- PAC-12 - 0
2017
- ACC - 3
- SEC - 1* (Ole Miss would have played a bowl had they not been under NCAA penalty
- B1G - 2
- Big 12 - 1
- PAC-12 - 3
2018
- ACC - 2
- SEC - 2
- B1G - 1
- Big 12 - 3
- PAC-12 - 1
2019
- ACC - 0 (only 4 teams finished with losing records. 6 teams finished 4-4. All 6 made a bowl)
- SEC - 2
- B1G - 2
- Big 12 - 0
- PAC-12 - 2
Not counting 2020 since there was no win requirement to get a bowl. But from 2016-2019, the ACC had 9 teams with losing conference records play in bowl games. The SEC had 8 (would’ve been 9 without NCAA violations), the B1G had 7, and the Big 12 and PAC-12 each had 6. In those 4 years the ACC had 15 teams finish at 4-4, and the SEC had 11. Because it’s literally impossible to finish with a .500 record in a 9 game schedule, some of those 4-4 teams would have had losing records in a 9 game schedule. So would it not be fair to say the ACC’s number of losing teams to make bowl games would be drastically higher than the other conferences if the ACC played 9 games? Does having more low-quality teams make bowl games mean the conference is better? I don’t think so. Is losing bowl games a metric that supports the ACC being a strongman conference? The numbers and data are out there. The overwhelming majority of it says the ACC as a whole is mediocre, and the worst of the