Let's get one thing out of the way:
If you have any kind of claim of being an upper echelon team in a Power Five (or as we like to call it around here, Power Four, Texas, Oklahoma and the Mountain West-alikes), you do not lose to Syracuse.
Like, ever.
I mean, kudos to Dino Babers for taking on a tough job - it's hard to convince bears and snowplow operators to relocate to upstate New York, let alone football prodigies from Florida or Texas or wherever - and making it work far better than would have seemed possible. The 'cute is no longer objectively bad, the way it has been for a long, long time.
But all last week, the chatter was about how Virginia Tech had finally found the missing ingredient, how they at long last had an offensive-minded coach who would unleash a supercharged Hokie attack while Bud Foster's defense remained impenetrable, and it would be Ken Oxendine time all over again.
Instead, Syracuse never trailed and won going away. And fairly or unfairly, every debate about how good VT actually is this year is going to end with the words, "Yeah, but they lost to Syracuse."
The rest of the league was, frankly, pretty dull. Good teams played down to the level of their opponents, the chalk generally - and barely - won, and nobody won in a blowout. This includes Georgia Tech, which beat Georgia Southern by the same margin that FSU beat Wake Forest by.
Yes, I know the Demon Deacons are having a good year, but when "exact comparison to Wake Forest football" gets thrown around, odds are things aren't going as well as you might have hoped.
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