At this point in the season we review each major conference team-by-team and ask what’s how the campaign’s faring thus far. We’re also doing the ACC.

1. Virginia Tech. If the ACC were ancient Greece, Virginia Tech would be its Athens: a proud, functional state led by a charismatic enlightened leader which, from time to time, gets the plague, suffers damaging military defeats, and has long, punchless stretches on offense. This year’s model varies slightly from the usual grappler/asphyxiator model Frank Beamer likes to trot out each year. The variations: an actual number one running back of productive nature in Ryan Williams, who takes back some of the yards given up on the other side by a rush defense that by Bud Foster’s standards has spent as much time on her back as female British tourist on holiday.

The rogering has been harmless to this point, though. Tyrod Taylor has graduated from status as “ditzy, ADD-stricken scrambler of no effect” to “ditzy, sometimes fatally efficient ADD-stricken scrambler of note.” Nebraska fans, look away, and the rest of you enjoy the fan screaming “Get rid of the ball you stupid piece of shi–” just at Taylor unleashes the winning throw.

VT is second in the ACC in passing efficiency thanks to the forceful run game and low red-zone percentages being put up by the defense, which is why they’re lagging in total d, being (relatively) generous with yardage and stingy with points. All you need to know about the ACC may be encapsulated in this factoid: The number one team for passing efficiency is Georgia Tech, meaning the conference remains a series of toddler offenses on tricycles jousting with with long plastic straws until someone gets poked in the eye and goes home.

The good news is that their only loss came to the number one team on our ballot, and they’re number one in the league in punting average. Frank Beamer only cares about one of these when he goes home to relax by firing up the bellows, putting on his smithing gear, and cranking out his favorite Christmas gift, a pound of freshly hammered and cooled coat rack hooks. It’s not the loss to Alabama, and we both know it.

(BTW: it sucks being friends with a blacksmith of limited skills. You think you’re going to get a honed katana or some shit like that, but noooooo, it’s all nails, fishhooks, and coat rack hooks for you. Um, we mean “Thanks for the eight pounds of crooked nails, Uncle Roy.” )

2. Miami. It’s nice having the U kind of back, much like the world is cooler with actual live wolves and alligators thriving in the wild, as long as they don’t run into your yard snatching children and jumping on your trampoline. They listen to Spongebob! They beat the hell out of Georgia Tech! They have the official endorsement of a squarepanted animated mogul!

The most colorful team in a league of blandishments certainly deserves a welcome back to the land of the living, and a customary lap dance/drink combo of their choice. (It will be thick Tisha over there, for sure, and the drink will be a mojito. ) Jacory Harris has been a revelation, and for the most part an icy, unflappable signal-caller and fashion icon all in one convenient, well-barbered package. The production from the wideouts (five-deep) has been nice, too, though the defense still alternates youthful, kill-y exuberance with youthful, suicidal lapses (thirty points allowed against both FSU and Virginia Tech.) Still a raw and inconsistent product with the upside to rise above the muddle of zombies constituting the middle of the ACC.

3. Georgia Tech. It is a sign of deep trouble for a conference when you hit team three and have to say something like this: the third-best team in the ACC could field ten men on defense without any significant variation in their current eleven-man performance. Tech has been alternately wondrous and mediocre on offense, but the weapons have multiplied: Josh Nesbitt, Roddy Jones, and Jonathan Dwyer now have Anthony Allen to lean on as well, and on the rare occasions when they do decide to pass the ball, Demaryius “Bebe” Thomas has been vicious and on pace for a 1,000 yard season. (He is also the only 1,000 yards Tech is going to have passing, but thus the fun of being a wideout in the Johnson offense.)

The defense ranks tenth in total defense, and is surpassed only by Maryland and the corpse of the Florida State defense in horrid reeking awfulness surrounded by vultures, flies, and an animal control man looking down holding a shovel in hand shaking his head. This means for entertainment value Tech ranks high, since you get to see not one, but two defenses on the field for a single team: a defense waving helplessly at the opposition running by, and the offense deliberately slowing down things in order to keep the defense from stroking out on the field after another instant scoring drive.

ATTENTION HERE LIES SHANTY TOWN PLEASE TAKE ALL VALUABLES AND THROW THEM FROM THE CAR TO SAVE TIME AND EFFORT ALSO HAND OVER THE CAR BECAUSE THEY ARE GONNA WANT THAT TOO THANK YOU YOU ARE NOW ENTERING SHANTY TOWN

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4. Wake Forest. At this point, we exit the walls of our gated compound and descend into the depressed, bland slums of the rest of the ACC, where vitamin deficiencies and the employment of retread coaches lead to a colorless muddle for the remainder of the conference. In this shantytown of football despair in all directions, and not even the colorful, vibrant shanties you might find in the lower ranks of the Pac-10 or SEC. No, these shanty-people know just how fucked they are, look pretty angry about it, and would find a tire to throw around your head for a Soweto Necktie if only they could find something resembling a spark out here. Thus the problem: this is the part of the league lacking the technology to make fire.

Wake has Riley Skinner, who has put up burly passing numbers in leading Wake past two conference opponents (Maryland and NC State) already. He, Marshall Williams, and Chris Givens can at least give Wake a shot to win any game no matter how porous the defense can be at times. (This is how they differ from Florida State: they sometimes make people punt once, or sometimes twice.) Thus their position atop the hill in the favela, and Jim Grobe’s renewed role in position of King of the ACC Slumlords.

5. Clemson. Block-C says it better than anyone else can:

Take this season for what it’s worth: Possibly slightly better than average as always.

The only key difference between this inconsistent Clemson team and any of the Tommy Bowden teams preceding it are the expectations. With Bowden, the current middling performance, occasionally baffling play-calling, and defensive lapses were indicative of a long pattern of patchy wish-fulfillment by the now-fired coach. Swinney has them as part of a two year on-the-job training course fans seem happy to enroll him in, though patience is wearing thin in graphic form. He’s nowhere near the “Bowden-Gump nebula of confusion” yet, but a loss to Maryland suggests the coordinates have been entered into the navigation system and the ship is steaming there as we speak. Did we mention they lost to Maryland? Despite having a tightfisted defense and CJ Spiller and Jacoby Ford? That Mary-land, yes?

6. Virginia. Oh, this feels soo good: meh. Will lose to William and Mary and somehow finish with seven wins and Al Groh skipping the Meineke Car Care Bowl to attend a bridge tournament in Delaware. Again, no one will notice. We would hate watching this team play football if it were worth the trouble of watching this team play football, which it’s not. Will undoubtedly win six games, and we don’t mean in a fun way, but instead in a kind of stone-passing, constipated agony kind of manner. Fast for the Big Ten, though, or at least fast enough to spark the annual Al Groh Career Drive they will rip through to finish the season at aggressively mediocre.

7. Duke. Quietly having a marvelous little season for itself, especially via Thaddeus Lewis’ outstanding 12/2 ratio and solid passing. At 3-3 and headed into the conference stretch, they may even win 6 games, a heroic total for David Cutcliffe’s team and a watershed year for Duke football if it happens. Will possibly win six games, and possibly in the fun way before being infected by the rest of the conference, contracting a debilitating case of ACC ennui, and firing Cutcliffe to take a chance on this Tom O’Brien guy everyone’s been talking about.

8. Maryland. No team has a deeper or more unabiding passion for slows. There’s Torrey Smith at wideout, and…and that’s about it. Ralph Friedgen isn’t even alternating bad games and good games this year like the Terrapins teams of yore: now he’s kind of in an exotic, prog-rockish 2-1-1-2 bad game to good game then reverse ratio, which sounds really cool if you’re into math rock, but sucks if you happen to be a Maryland fan hoping to win two games that count in a row. This team would be slow in the Big Ten. This is not a compliment to anyone.

9. North Carolina. The best defense in the conference, and a tribute to the species of the armadillo, a species Butch Davis developed an affinity for while coaching in South Florida. See, sometimes they cross the road down there, and if you catch them just the right way with your car you can send them flying in spectacular arcs, little careening brown armored balls hurtling like varmint shrapnel all over the place. Butch so obviously did this once, watched as the stricken ‘dilla crept off without a limp, and thought “One day, I’m ‘a gonna build me a team like that.” This year, that dream comes true, because while the UNC defense is nigh indestructible, the UNC offense has no claws, teeth, venom, or tenacity to speak of, and subsists off grubby field goals and punts it finds discarded on the ground. And like armadilloes, many larger, more toothsome predators consider them more “food on the half-shell” than “hopelessly well-armored anti-snack.”

10. NC State. Have fallen so far that they have become one of those teams that Pitt isn’t supposed to lose to, but does, and then everyone remembers they’re Pitt, so that’s fine and everything is in its right place. Bowling Green-On-The-Piedmont has found the offense that failed to show up against South Carolina in their opener, but has now conveniently given the defense off for good behavior, allowing 5 TDS through the air against Duke and causing Tom O’Brien to never leave a man behind…

“Kids have got to make plays,” O’Brien said. “It’s not the scheme and it’s not the coaches. Right now we’ve got to make plays. No more great example than the first two third downs in the game where we’re in perfect position to make plays and don’t get the guy on the ground.”

…unless they screw up your perfect play-calling and doom Mike Archer’s brilliant schemes. Yes, LSU fans. That Mike Archer. We’re sorry you just choked on your post-prandial whiskey. A less-spacious and more crime-ridden part of ACC Shantytown for sure, though Russell Wilson is doing his damnedest to move them on up.

11. Boston College For the third time: Jeff Jagodzinski is taking calls. All day. F’realz.

12. Florida State.Would be 11, but lost to the current number 11 and is winless in conference. Here despite the excellent numbers Christian Ponder has put up: 297 yards a game, 9 TDs, 1 INT, and all the effort one can humanly put into putting out the raging wildfire consuming the wreckage of the Florida State program. He’s trying. He really, really is. If we didn’t hate the Florida State football program like fat adorable seals hate polar bears, this would have a twinge of noble sacrifice to it. It might even be admirable. With a 12th ranked defense in conference failing to cover anything thrown at them and performing with the discipline of a well-oiled retirement home dance troupe, Ponder has become a Camus character before our eyes. If Tech could play ten men and still allow the same ridiculous number of points, Florida State could play 12 and do the same, possibly worse (there’s more people to trip over, run into, and fight on the sidelines.)

In summary: the ACC brings more ass to the game than Andressa Soares, and not in a good way like Andressa Soares. A conference rich in bottom, and the monkey with seven asses of college football conferences. When the Mountain West claims it has a point about the BCS, it points here. Writing this caused us physical pain. It’s time to lie down on a pillow made of vodka and see if we dream of better football. Ouch. Whimper. Reaches for bottle.