ACC Football Power Rankings, Week 4: Virginia on top of Coastal division

If this were NCIS, Leroy Jethro Gibbs would tell you always trust your gut. This is a gut ranking here. We didn’t learn much about the Hurricanes after a 66-0 rout of the Bethune-Cookman Wildcats this past weekend. They took care of business against a team whose players probably weren’t recruited by another school in Division I.

When you have freshman as key pieces of your offense, you are going to struggle. They have freshman as key pieces of their offense. Pull back the layers of their two loses and you can’t help but come away saying, when they get it, they are going to be really good. They had opportunities to beat both Florida and North Carolina. They could easily be 3-0 as they are 1-2.

We’ll know a smidge more about them next week against an improved Central Michigan squad; it will be interesting to see how they perform against Virginia Tech the week after the CMU game.

Let’s not bury the lead here. We will see how talented the Panthers are when they take on the Central Florida Golden Knights next Saturday afternoon at Heinz Field. We know they are probably over matched from a speed standpoint, but Pat Narduzzi and his staff will have the Panthers ready to play. Can they limit the big play capabilities of the Knights?

They did a good job of the very same thing against the Penn State Nittany Lions this past weekend coming up short in a 17-10 loss. Pitt got to Nittany Lions quarterback Shawn Clifford three times and hurried him even more in the loss.

Pitt is going to play hard aggressive defense, but they need to figure out a way to score points. If they face a high-powered offense, it will be hard for them to stop even with as talented a secondary as they have.

The Blue Devils make the biggest leap in the power rankings moving from 11 to No. 6. Much of this is because the rest of the teams in this conference are quite difficult to make heads or tails of and the other is the played arguably the second best team in the country to open the season and were clearly over matched. Their opener against Alabama isn’t an indicator of what they’ll be this season.

Since the loss to Alabama they’ve put together two wins in a row albeit against inferior teams (North Carolina A&T and MTSU). This makes their next game this Friday against the Hokies so interesting. You have two teams that seem to trend in opposite directions. The Hokies haven’t looked motivated all year, and the Blue Devils are settling into their new identity on offense.

Fifth year senior quarterback Quentin Harris is leading the Blue Devils in both passing and rushing yards. This has become an offense a bit more centered around the run though that is no indictment on Harris’ ability as a passer. He’s completing 73 percent percent of his passes and has thrown eight touchdowns to two interceptions. If the Hokies lack motivation this Friday, Duke will have a field day.

In the conference game that wasn’t a conference game, the North Carolina Tar Heels couldn’t snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in a 24-18 loss against the Wake Forest Demon Deacons. Logic dictates that if you play from behind enough, you are going to lose. North Carolina was out-gained by over 100 yards in this game, and freshman quarterback Sam Howell finally looked like a freshman.

The Deacons, not the Tar Heels were the team that made the key plays down the stretch. Head coach Dave Clawson proved his Demon Deacons can play ball control offense forcing North Carolina to burn all three time-outs on a drive that lasted five minutes and resulting in a game clinching field goal.

This might be the stretch where Howell begins to look like a true freshman, and the Tar Heels begin to come down to earth. They get App State and Clemson in back-to-back weeks, and that might be enough for the try-hard Tar Heels to slide down these rankings.