New ACC Schedule Format Reveal

Do you wish that Clemson was kept as a protected annual rival?

  • Yes

    Votes: 55 40.1%
  • No

    Votes: 36 26.3%
  • Indifferent

    Votes: 46 33.6%

  • Total voters
    137

bobongo

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@bobongo this might be nitpicking, but we’re 4-4. We need to win at least two of the remaining 4 games. We’re slight underdogs to UVA, will be solid underdogs to Clemson, might be favorites against Syracuse, and I don’t even have a guess as to the UGA point spread.

I think the oddsmakers would give us about 1.5 wins remaining. We have line of sight to a bowl game, but we’ll be overcoming odds to get to six wins.

Making a bowl game would be a big uptick from the first two thirds of the season.

I’m hopeful, but it’s a stretch. If we beat UVA, it’s a good shot.
I think we're going bowling.
 

bobongo

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7,574
Another fun fact: UGA's first four opponents this year were UT Martin, Ball State, USC East, and UAB. A real murderer's row which obviously should undermine their relevancy. But wait - they're still #1 in the AP. That's because relevancy is achieved by sustained winning performance. Let's get to a bowl game, get our players some additional practice time and more eyeballs on our team, and continue to improve recruiting. This will lead to more wins.
That doesn't apply or translate to us one whit. They can get away with that. We won't build our fan base by scheduling lightweights.
 

roadkill

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That doesn't apply or translate to us one whit. We won't build our fan base by scheduling lightweights.
We build our fan base by winning, going to bowls, and getting more eyeballs to see the team winning. How many fans do you think we gained by the loss to Ole Miss? I think we may just need to agree to disagree on this.
 

bobongo

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7,574
We build our fan base by winning, going to bowls, and getting more eyeballs to see the team winning. How many fans do you think we gained by the loss to Ole Miss? I think we may just need to agree to disagree on this.
Your seeming assumption that every scheduled game against a ranked P-5 is an automatic loss has already been proven wrong twice this year. This idea that we can't beat anybody is ridiculous. Yeah, we lost. Tomorrow, we win. And won't it be nice to beat somebody instead of nobody? Big teams pack the stands. Little ones leave them empty.
 
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roadkill

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Your seeming assumption that every scheduled game against P-5 is an automatic loss has already been proven wrong twice this year.
Sure. And over the long haul, do you think that expecting to win as underdogs and lose as a favorite is a good way to build a program?
 

bobongo

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7,574
Sure. And over the long haul, do you think that expecting to win as underdogs and lose as a favorite is a good way to build a program?
A loaded question. We build the program by beating somebody. It's as simple as that. Beat nobody and nobody cares. I'm talking about us in our situation.
 

bigrabbit

Jolly Good Fellow
Messages
297
Wake Forest went 11-3 in 2021. Are they relevant? Does anybody remember that season? No. Because the didn’t beat anybody of substance. They lost to North Carolina. Lost to Clemson. And lost to Pitt in the ACC championship. The win that means the most to their fans that season? Beating a 5-7 Florida State team.

Nobody gives a **** if you win 11 games against nobodies. How many people care that Air Force is 8-0 right now? Not many. They have the worst schedule in the country and basically have no shot to go into a NY6 bowl even if they finish the season undefeated.

At Tech, 8-4 doesn’t get you into the playoff. It probably doesn’t get you into the ACCCG. It doesn’t get you ranked. But 8-4 with a win against Clemson, or Georgia, or Notre Dame, or Florida State matters. People will remember that game. People will remember that season because of the big win. Hell, people on this forum still talk about the 1981 win against Alabama. A team that won 1 singular game is considered one of the most memorable and special games in Tech history. Why? Because it was against #2 Alabama. If we had beaten Furman or Navy or hell even somebody like Syracuse would anybody remember it? Hell no.

The point is, the big games matter. The odds of Tech ever truly competing for a national title again are slim to none. Doing away with our best games, ending our deepest rivalries in the hopes of maybe winning 8 games is not going to help the program. We should just leave the ACC and join the Sun Belt if that’s the goal. Go ahead and take UGA, Clemson, Notre Dame, FSU, and Miami off the schedule permanently. Schedule Memphis, UAB, Georgia Southern, Texas State, and Southern Miss. See how many people show up to the games then.
If this is directed partly at me, let me reiterate my desire to play uga but earlier in the season. For one thing, I think we’ll have a better chance earlier, although some of that perception probably stems from the hilarious comments from Spurrier - iirc along the lines of “play them early while they still have players in jail”.

Your comment assumes we play few other high profile programs to prove ourselves, which isn’t the case, and there is nothing stopping us from scheduling another top program instead of SC State.

We’ve beaten uga 4 times in the past 23 years. That could turn around, and if it does we would still get the pleasure of beating them. But we should mostly focus on winning our conference (didn’t Bobby Ross say that?) and (news flash) we’re not in the SEC any more and never will be.
 

takethepoints

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6,096
A loaded question. We build the program by beating somebody. It's as simple as that. Beat nobody and nobody cares. I'm talking about us in our situation.
I'm with the other guy. You build a program by winning. Full Stop. It doesn't matter who you win against. What matters is that the team thinks - correctly, if things are going right - that you have a chance to win every time you go onto the field. As I keep saying, a decade from now what will the people who look follow ACC football remember about the 2021 Wake team. That they won 11 games, played for the ACC championship, and won their bowl game. Not much else. And count on Clawson to build on that.

I don't mean that you should play all patsies. A couple of tough games are de rigueur. But every week? Like Tech's schedule over the last few years? Please, spare me.
 

bke1984

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So we complain about how hard our schedule is with Clempson on it every year. Then we complain that we won't be playing them every year. Got it.

The way we are set up, J Batt is looking 10+ years down the road. We get to play all foes more regularly. It also gets us ready for jumping the ACC to another conference by starting to pump the brakes on our ACC "rivalries" rather than pull the emergency brake. I fully believe this is an easier path that gets us to Charlotte, which is goal number one. Win that game and we get to the 8 team playoff. All bets are off at that point.
I for one never complained. The only team we will play every year now is Georgia. I’m sure I’m starting to sound like a grumpy old man at 39, but this is just f’ing stupid. College football (and honestly all sports) is (are) better when you play the many of the same teams every year. It creates rivalries and excitement. This new model of massive conferences that try to rotate the teams eliminates that. So now we just get some revolving door of opponents every few years. Great.
 

BleedGoldNWhite21

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1,473
Wake Forest went 11-3 in 2021. Are they relevant? Does anybody remember that season? No. Because the didn’t beat anybody of substance. They lost to North Carolina. Lost to Clemson. And lost to Pitt in the ACC championship. The win that means the most to their fans that season? Beating a 5-7 Florida State team.

Nobody gives a **** if you win 11 games against nobodies. How many people care that Air Force is 8-0 right now? Not many. They have the worst schedule in the country and basically have no shot to go into a NY6 bowl even if they finish the season undefeated.

At Tech, 8-4 doesn’t get you into the playoff. It probably doesn’t get you into the ACCCG. It doesn’t get you ranked. But 8-4 with a win against Clemson, or Georgia, or Notre Dame, or Florida State matters. People will remember that game. People will remember that season because of the big win. Hell, people on this forum still talk about the 1981 win against Alabama. A team that won 1 singular game is considered one of the most memorable and special games in Tech history. Why? Because it was against #2 Alabama. If we had beaten Furman or Navy or hell even somebody like Syracuse would anybody remember it? Hell no.

The point is, the big games matter. The odds of Tech ever truly competing for a national title again are slim to none. Doing away with our best games, ending our deepest rivalries in the hopes of maybe winning 8 games is not going to help the program. We should just leave the ACC and join the Sun Belt if that’s the goal. Go ahead and take UGA, Clemson, Notre Dame, FSU, and Miami off the schedule permanently. Schedule Memphis, UAB, Georgia Southern, Texas State, and Southern Miss. See how many people show up to the games then.

No offense, but this is not a very compelling point. No one outside of us gives a **** about our 11 win season in 2014, either. That’s just how sports work. No one cares outside of their own fanbase, so that goes back to the real question: how do you build a program? By consistently winning. How do you do that? Well you start by not tying your arm around your back scheduling unnecessary tough non-conference games. We play UGA every year. ACC has it where we’ll play Notre Dame every few years. We can get away with two easier games a year. In years we have UGA and ND, we can get away with a bad G5 team and one FCS team. Hell, right now we can’t beat G5 teams consistently!
 

Techster

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18,235
If I remember right it was an iterative process. Vaught didn't want to schedule Tech, so Dodd didn't schedule either Mississippi schools. There wasn't much in it for either coach at the time. And this led to trouble later.

But maybe I'm not remembering correctly. I mean, I was wrong just last month …

Maybe they were retelling it through the lens of GT fans, but this article talks about Dodd's blockade on scheduling the Mississippi schools during his time as our HC:


I can't pull the quote as AJC is a paid website for articles, but apparently there's a work around others have found.
 

awbuzz

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Marietta, GA
Pretty sure the ACC had absolutely nothing to do with us playing FSU in Ireland or Notre Dame in MBS. Both of those were GT decisions and the ACC was not involved. The ACC has shafted Tech in different ways before, but neither of those 2 games are reasons to be disgruntled with the conference.
Now, now... Don't go dropping facts and other people's complaints 😊
 

bobongo

Helluva Engineer
Messages
7,574
I'm with the other guy. You build a program by winning. Full Stop. It doesn't matter who you win against. What matters is that the team thinks - correctly, if things are going right - that you have a chance to win every time you go onto the field. As I keep saying, a decade from now what will the people who look follow ACC football remember about the 2021 Wake team. That they won 11 games, played for the ACC championship, and won their bowl game. Not much else. And count on Clawson to build on that.

I don't mean that you should play all patsies. A couple of tough games are de rigueur. But every week? Like Tech's schedule over the last few years? Please, spare me.
I don't think we should play tough games "every week", and we haven't over the last few years. Our OOC formula is Ugag, one other P-5, a G-5, and a patsy. A couple of tough games, like you said. As for Clemson, they're our last remaining rival outside Ugag, and we should play them every year. The schedule has gotten tougher because our two rivals, Ugag and Clemson, have gotten tougher. Now Clemson has come back to earth and Ugag will too. Just as a reminder, schedules are made a decade in advance.
 

stinger78

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Maybe they were retelling it through the lens of GT fans, but this article talks about Dodd's blockade on scheduling the Mississippi schools during his time as our HC:


I can't pull the quote as AJC is a paid website for articles, but apparently there's a work around others have found.
Look through these two websites <jhowell.net> and <stassen.com> and look at who all else either weren't playing the MS schools or weren't playing them in MS and you'll notice that GA Tech was far from alone.
 

bigrabbit

Jolly Good Fellow
Messages
297
Maybe they were retelling it through the lens of GT fans, but this article talks about Dodd's blockade on scheduling the Mississippi schools during his time as our HC:


I can't pull the quote as AJC is a paid website for articles, but apparently there's a work around others have found.
The AJC article shows there’s nothing new - Coach Prime has just updated the 140 rule strategy to include the portal as a resource. Dodd wouldn’t flush players like that, GT ethics still preclude treating players that way.
 
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