THB Staff ACC Predictions: Week of 11/18

It’s the week before Hate Week! Which means... yeah, a lot of scheduled non-conference breathers for Power 5 teams, making our predictions even more boring than usual. But as wild as the non-Clemson ACC is, there’s always room for unpredictability. After all, we unanimously picked Duke to beat Syracuse and that went 45-6 the other way. And in basketball, we’re getting the week before early tournament season, which means we’ll start getting widespread interesting matchups next week after another one this week to pad our stats a little. Last week, the only remotely polarizing matchup was UNC Asheville at Wake Forest, which ended up a pretty convincing win for the Deacons despite my hopes.

The top of the football standings hasn’t changed, as you’d expect from a week where our picks were as unanimous as they were last week. Evan becomes the first of us to break 70 wins, with Chad positioned nicely for a comeback with 69 and myself right behind 68. Al, Matt, and Tanya are just behind. Basketball is essentially identical to what it was last week, because the UNCA game was the only one in question. Bryson takes the lead at 17-2 after being smart enough not to fall for upset bait. Anyways, here are our picks for this week:

We’ve got two interesting conference games! NCSU and Georgia Tech aren’t good, but they just might be entertaining, and we’ve got a pretty even split among us as to who we think will win. Pittsburgh going to Blacksburgh is a high-stakes game with an unclear result, so that’s pretty cool.

And here, smart money just picks the home team across the board, with the exception of Duke-Cal, which is at a neutral site (MSG, because of course). Davidson-Wake could be interesting; McKillop’s got a decent squad this year and Wake are still floundering. I’m also excited to get to see Anthony Edwards against an ACC team, as poor a representative as Georgia Tech might be. But this is going to be another week where the standings don’t really separate anybody, except for Jake, whose pettiness I greatly appreciate.

Agree with our picks? Disagree? Any games you’re looking forward to this weekend? Let us know below!