The ACC is spoiling Mack Brown’s plan to be conference champion.

When Brown returned to Carolina for his second stint, he was asked about the Tar Heels’ realistic chances to win their first ACC championship since 1980.

He smiled and said, with divisional play, he liked their chances better than when he was here from 1988 through 1997. During that stretch, Florida State was the dominating program, winning nine consecutive conference titles and ranked in the top five nationally for 14 straight seasons.

“No one else really had a chance back then because Florida State was so good,” Brown said.

He could say the same thing about Clemson, which was amid six straight titles when Brown came back. But he saw one big difference, and that was divisional play. Before the ACC split into the Atlantic and Coastal, there was no championship game and the team with the best regular-season record was the champion and went to whatever big bowl the league had as a partner.

With Clemson and Florida State both in the Atlantic, Brown believed Carolina in the Coastal gave the Tar Heels a path to at least the ACC Championship Game, where at the end of a long season anything could happen. For example, Larry Fedora’s best UNC team won the division and gave Clemson a good game in Charlotte before the Tigers prevailed, 45-37.

With this being the last season of divisional play, before the top two teams in the overall standings begin advancing to the championship game, Brown thinks the odds of another team besides the favorites will decrease in the future. He liked UNC’s position in the Coastal, which was borne out when each of the seven teams won the division over a seven-year span.

The Heels’ three primary opponents in the new format for 2023 are Duke, N.C. State and Virginia, which they played every year anyway. Duke and Virginia are in the Coastal and State was UNC’s one primary rival every team had.

So this season, both divisions look closer than they have ever been. Clemson finally did not win the Atlantic in 2021, giving way to Wake Forest. And Pitt emerged as Coastal champion after a dogfight in that division the entire way.

No matter who is picked to win each division in 2022, most of the other schools appear to have a reasonable chance of getting to the championship game.

The dynamic completely changes when the first- and second-place teams in a league of 14 make it. The actual odds may be the same, but the climb to the top of the standings will look far more daunting.

 

Featured image via Tar Heel Illustrated

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