ACC Football Final Postseason Recap: It Wasn't Pretty

Only two of the 13 ACC teams in the postseason won their games

Tony the Tiger tosses corn flakes on Louisville head coach Jeff Brohm after the Cardinals won the Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl / GABY VELASQUEZ/ USA TODAY / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

The feeling across the country was that ACC was not a particularly strong football conference this season.  The postseason results did not change that opinion.

Fans often use bowl-game results as evidence of the strength of a given conference, and that’s generally a faulty way to prove conference superiority.  It’s even less indicative of conference strength these days because a team’s postseason roster often looks very different from its regular-season roster with all the player transfers and opt-outs and coaching changing.

However, it’s difficult for the ACC to explain its way out of its bowl record this season.  The ACC had 13 teams play postseason games, tying the SEC for the most of any conference.  But only two ACC teams won their bowl games – Louisville, which beat Washington by a point when the Huskies failed on a two-point attempt with nine seconds left, and Syracuse, which knocked off a Washington State team that was without its head coach, its offensive coordinator, it defensive coordinator and 27 players who were in the transfer portal, including its starting quarterback.

The ACC’s 2-11 postseason record was the worst of any conference, unless you include the Pac-12, which lost its one and only bowl game.  Making the ACC’s record look worse is the fact that it went 0-3 against teams from Group of Five conferences.

The two ACC representatives in the College Football Playoff – Clemson and SMU – lost in the first round, leaving the ACC as the only Power Four conference without a representative in the quarterfinals. It’s the fourth straight season the ACC did not have a team in the College Football Playoff semifinals.

Like we said earlier, postseason results are not necessarily indicative of a conference’s overall strength.

But . . . .

Here are the postseason records of each conference through games played on Friday, January 3, listed in order of their winning percentage. (The ACC has no more postseason games to play.)

Independents (2 teams) – 3-0 (1.000)

American (8 teams) – 6-2 (.750)

MAC (7 teams) – 4-2 (.667)

Big 12 (12 teams) – 9-5 (.642)

SEC (13 teams) – 8-6 (.571)

Sun Belt (7 teams) – 4-3 (.571)

Big 12 (8 teams) – 4-5 (.444)

Conference USA (5 teams) – 1-3 (.250)

Mountain West (5 teams) – 1-4 (.200)

ACC (13 teams) – 2-11 (.153)

Pac-12 (1 team) – 0-1 (.000)

ACC postseason results, in the order in which the games were played, with the ACC team in bold:

LA Bowl – UNLV 24, Cal 13 – The Bears were without quarterback Fernando Mendoza, who had entered the transfer portal and eventually committed to Indiana.

College Football Playoff first round – Penn State 38, SMU 10 – There were questions whether SMU or Alabama deserved to be the final at-large team in the CFP. This result did not quiet the argument.

College Football Playoff first round – Texas 38, Clemson 24 – Clemson has been the ACC’s top national-title contender for the past decade, winning it all in 2016 and 2018, and the Tigers gave a good account of themselves this year, but still failed to reach the quarterfinals.

GameAbove Sports Bowl – Toledo 48, Pitt 46 (6 OT) – Pitt was without its top two quarterbacks, but losing to a team that tied for sixth in the MAC is not a good look.

Birmingham Bowl – Vanderbilt 35, Georgia Tech 27 – The Yellow Jackets had more significant player absences than Vanderbilt, which achieved its first bowl victory and first winning season in 11 years.

Holiday Bowl – Syracuse 52, Washington State 35 – Orange quarterback Kyle McCord (453 yards, 5 TDs, 0 interceptions) helped his NFL draft status by not opting out with a big game against the depleted Cougars.

Fenway Bowl – UConn 27, North Carolina 14 – Bill Belichick has a lot of work to do with this team, which played the bowl game without second-team All-American running back Omarion Hampton and played most of the game without quarterback Jacolby Crisswell.

Pinstripe Bowl – Nebraska 20, Boston College 15 – The Eagles (7-6) are consistent. They have won six or seven games in 10 of the past 12 seasons.

Pop Tarts Bowl – Iowa State 42, Miami (Fla.) 41 – Cam Ward decided to play in the bowl game – but only in the first half.  He was a half-opt-out.

Military Bowl – East Carolina 26, North Carolina State 21 – A brawl in the final minute is what is remembered from this game, and these North Carolina rivals open the 2025 season against each other.

Sun Bowl – Louisville 35, Washington 34 – A great play by Louisville linebacker Antonio Watts, who knocked down a pass on Washington’s two-point conversion attempt with nine seconds left, saved the day for Louisville.

Gator Bowl – Mississippi 52, Duke 20 – Even if Duke quarterback Maalik Murphy and running back Star Thomas had been available, this looked like a mismatch.  And it was.

Duke’s Mayo Bowl – Minnesota 24, Virginia Tech 10 – The most interesting aspects of this game were the TV broadcasters tasing weird mayonnaise-related sandwiches and the mayonnaise shower for Minnesota coach PJ Fleck

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