Two programs ACC football should waste no time inviting

Team No. 1: Appalachian State Mountaineers

The first of our two teams is Appalachian State, and anyone who has followed Group of Five football in the last several years should know why it is considered worthy.

The Mountaineers have sat amongst college football’s greatest squads for the last three decades, a span that has seen them perform beautifully at both the FCS and FBS levels. They have suffered only one losing season since 1993 and, before their 6-6 run in 2022, had seen nine wins or more for seven years straight.

That level of consistency would be enough to thrust them into Power Five talks on its own, but there is another advantage the Mountaineers have that should make them all the more attractive to the ACC: their location.

Especially after a midwestern conference like the Big Ten decided to accept two schools from Southern California, it can certainly be argued that the importance of geography has been dealt a rather fatal hand in the realignment business. But nonetheless, I feel that it at least qualifies as a bonus when judging a potential addition’s overall appeal, and in the ACC’s case, there’s nothing more appealing than the state of North Carolina.

North Carolina is the best place a potential ACC team could be

Of the Atlantic Coast’s six founding members that are still in the league, four of them are in North Carolina (UNC, NC State, Duke, and Wake Forest). Its connection to the state grows even stronger when remembering its headquarters has always been stationed in Greensboro (will soon be relocated to Charlotte).

The conference being so deep-rooted in that area while App State hails from Boone, NC makes the Mountaineers feel all the more like ACC members in the making.

Unfortunately, there is rarely ever any good news without at least a touch of bad. In this instance, the bad news comes from both of App State’s basketball programs. The men have not finished a season with 20-plus wins since 2010, and the women have only done so once since 2013.

With that said, there is one glimmer of hope on the men’s side of things. In its 2019-20 stretch, App State’s men’s basketball finished with a record of 18-15, ending a streak of losing records that had covered the previous eight seasons. Since then, they have not finished under .500 once.

To summarize: Appalachian State is a stunning football school in a favorable location. While its basketball leaves a lot to be desired, the men’s program is seemingly on a gradual rise. All of that amounts to enough for me to view the Mountaineers as worthy of helping satisfy the ACC’s hypothetical hunger for expansion — especially if the conference were to ever grow more desperate.