- The better teams in the conference can and will routinely beat the stuffing out of early season cupcakes. That being said, Clemson-SC State got so bad the teams agreed to knock six minutes off the second half to make sure that there were actually going to be some survivors headed back home on the SCSU team bus, a magnanimous gesture by Dabo Swinney that will no doubt come back to bite him when someone complains that Clemson's average margin of victory wasn't big enough and thus his team shouldn't be in the CFB playoff.
- North Carolina still can't stop anyone, especially not on the ground. James Madison hung around way longer than they had any right to.
- Pitt is good enough to beat bad teams and bad enough to come close-but-no-cigar against good teams. Syracuse, Boston College and Virginia remain terrible. As a BC alum, I weep for the train wreck unfolding in Chestnut Hill; it wasn't that long ago (OK maybe it was) when I was helping haul a keg up six flights of stairs to an apartment off Cleveland Circle so we could watch the Eagles put the final kibosh on Notre Dame. Now, whoah. But really, the worst offender is Virginia. The other two are just bad. The Cavaliers lost to UConn, college football's equivalent of a zombie with lit dynamite shoved down its pants.
- David Cutcliffe has at least temporarily run out of magic at Duke. They lost to Northwestern in the Power 5 Nerd Fight of the week (they should totally spin off a nerd conference with Stanford, Vandy, etc.) and these days, to lose to Northwestern you really have to work at it. Thankfully, the Blue Devils were up to the task.
Which leaves us with the one thing that actually mattered in the ACC last weekend: OH MY GOD WHO HIT LOUISVILLE WITH ALL THE GAMMA RADIATION? The Cardinals basically went full Hulk on what was supposed to be a very good Florida State team and mashed them to a fine pulp. Put it another way: Syracuse put up more of a fight than FSU did, and that's even with the Bowdens tacking on a few points in garbage time. Going into the season, the assumption was that once again, Clemson and Florida State would be the class of the conference, with Louisville tucked in at #3 - trailing the big 2 but ahead of the Dukes and UNCs of the world.
This estimation was, as you might have noticed, woefully incorrect. Louisville is one of the big boys, and FSU...is not. Mind you, there's all kinds of snark to be had in university administration admitting that the success of bringing back reprobate coach Bobby Petrino is measured strictly in wins and losses, as opposed to, say, how many motorcycle accidents he gets into while canoodling with a staff member.
This week is pretty much the last week of the cupcake feast, or, as I like to call it, "pretty much BC's last chance for a win". Next week the conference schedule - and don't think there hasn't been geshrying around these parts over how television is affecting conference scheduling - kicks in, and we can settle back into watching everyone who isn't Louisville and Clemson beat the tar out of each other and then all gang up on Virginia. In the meantime, though, we can all watch UConn-Syracuse and dream we're seeing a Big East basketball tournament final from 2004, because that's going to be a hell of a lot more fun than this football game.
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