ACC Football Week 4: Staff Predictions

This past Saturday was the first one that felt like a real college football Saturday, and as much as we want to make fun of how superior the SEC thinks it is, their teams coming back finally made for some fun channel surfing as they joined the fray with the ACC and Big XII.

And man, did you find some fun things if you were flipping around. From the National Champions losing in their first time on the field, to a crazy comeback win by the Texas Longhorns, to Kansas State surprising Oklahoma in Norman. The ACC, in comparison, had a pretty blah slate. Only two of the six games were decided by one possession, and one of those games shouldn’t have been that close. Looking at you, Boston College. Louisville and Pitt lived up to their rankings, every other game was a laugher. That doesn’t mean that things went as expected, as Syracuse managed to bite the surging Yellow Jackets in the reopening of the Orangedome, and Virginia Tech shrugged off barely being able to field a team to outright humiliate NC State in the opener for the Hokies.

The win by the Hokies wouldn’t have been a surprise had the headlines not been rife with speculation the Hokies still couldn’t field a full team due to COVID testing. Those headlines are are several of our staffers, yours truly included, couldn’t believe that Virginia Tech would pull out a win against an NC State team that put up 45 on Wake Forest a week before. So much for our ability to predict things. Some weren’t fooled, though, as you can see:

Hat tip goes to Max for having a perfect 6-0 week in perhaps the toughest slate yet to get right. His prowess has catapulted him to a three way tie for first along with Joe and Evan. Still, as you can see, nine other writers are within three games of the top spot, so all it’ll take is another week like Max had and someone else can leap from the pack.

Someone who will need a couple of weeks like that, though, is Jake. Jake was the only one who picked both Duke and NC State, and even though he tried to cover for it by saying it was gross, the karma ended up coming back to bite him. He was the only one to having a losing week. He’s not only in the cellar, he’s there two games behind the next pair, Brandon and Michael.

You won’t be very surprised at our picks this week:

Only two games this week created any sort of disagreement, and surprisingly one of those is with Max trying for the super upset of Jacksonville State over Florida State. I guess when you go 6-0 you think you can see everything, so we’ll see if he has the right feel for just how far the Seminoles have fallen. Chad, Doug, and Jake do not believe in Virginia Tech despite both how they looked last weekend and how poor Duke has looked. Everyone else went straight chalk, so we’ll see how the week changes up after the games are played.