When, How Will ACC Teams Bridge Gap With Clemson?

Clemson football has won five consecutive ACC titles and hasn't lost to a conference foe since 2017, but North Carolina and others are trying to bridge the gap through recruiting.

The gap between Clemson and the rest of the ACC is so huge, it’s hard to even discuss how it would be closed.

After all, the Tigers haven’t lost a conference game since Oct. 13, 2017. They’ve been a double-digit favorite in 29 of their last 30 games against ACC competition.

That all being said, what will it take for somebody to dethrone the five-time conference champs? How long will it be before it can be done? And who actually has a chance to make that happen?

Sure, maybe a team from the Coastal Division will be the one to do it in the ACC championship game someday. Anything can happen on a single Saturday. North Carolina in 2015 and Virginia Tech in 2016 gave the Tigers a scare and kept it within single digits.

Since then, it hasn’t been close; the Tigers have beaten Miami 38-3, Pitt 42-10 and Virginia 62-17. That gap is widening, not shrinking.

The Coastal has to get better. So does the Atlantic. And that is not done by hoping for one special, magical night in Charlotte, N.C., or pulling off the rare upset of Clemson and then still being good enough to suffer just one loss along the way.

No, these teams are going to have to recruit better, or hope the Tigers’ talent drastically falls off. There is no evidence the latter will occur any time soon, so who can bridge at least some of the game by getting better recruits?

In 2020, according to 247 Sports Composite rankings, Clemson had the third-best recruiting class in the nation. It’s also the best in school history.

The next two teams behind the Tigers were Miami (13th) and North Carolina (19th). They combined for zero five-star prospects, while the Tigers landed five.

So far in the 2021 class, which is far from complete, Clemson is ranked second behind Ohio State. The next closest ACC team is UNC at...fifth? That’s right. The Tar Heels currently have a top-5 recruiting class.

It’s premature to know if that will stick, but couple that with last year’s top-20 class and all of a sudden Mack Brown is on to something there.

When the national-title-winning Texas coach decided to return for a second stint at North Carolina at age 67 and five years removed from the game, there were plenty of questions. Many of those revolved around recruiting by a coach who might not stick around for even his first class to graduate, but that doesn’t appear to be the case right now.

Brown started by flipping quarterback Sam Howell from Florida State to UNC in the 2019 class, which finished 30th overall, and now the program has one of the nation’s top sophomore signal-callers.

In a recent interview with ESPN, Brown talked about why he’s been able to make an immediate impact.

"I think the generation gap is people; if you can relate to kids, you can relate to kids. We're so honest that a lot of people in recruiting tell them what they want to hear. I've got 32 years of players that are going to tell people that I told them the truth, and we even have seven guys on our staff that played for me at North Carolina." — Mack Brown

If Brown lands a top-10 class next year, maybe UNC is the team to start thinking about challenging Clemson. After all, the Heels did come up a point short on the field against the Tigers a year ago. They also went 7-6 overall and 4-4 in ACC play. Steps are still needed.

Second-year coach Manny Diaz is doing a nice job bringing talent to Miami so far, but there’s such a propensity in that program to waste talent in recent years that it’s too early to buy what the Hurricanes are doing.

First-year coach Mike Norvell should be able to get Florida State, which currently has the 19th-best class in 2021, back on track on the field, but he was used to doing more with less at AAC power Memphis. Now the pressure is on to keep big-time Sunshine State talent from going to the other schools or getting outside the borders.

However, it might not take that much time to turn the tide in Tallahassee; it’s a program set up to skip a few steps if Norvell is the right guy.

Other than that, Clemson has no reason to fear Louisville, Pitt, Virginia in terms of talent acquisition, even though those aren’t poorly coached teams. The Cardinals have made a huge jump from Bobby Petrino’s final run to Scott Satterfield’s initial campaign, but Louisville has had a hard time historically pulling in four- and five-star talent.

The rest just have too far to go, whether it’s needing better players or coaches or both.

UNC is worth keeping an eye on, though. There feels like there’s something special brewing with Brown, but it’s way too early to start penciling anybody from the Coastal into the ACC title game any time soon.