The 2024 ACC football season will be unlike anything in the league’s history. Now at 17 teams with the additions of Cal, Stanford and SMU, the conference spans from coast-to-coast. It features a varied makeup of programs with all kinds of expectations heading into the fall. There are multiple jobs with new coaches since the end of 2023 and a few teams with coaches still early in their tenures, but also ACC mainstays like Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, NC State’s Dave Doeren and — if we are counting both the 1990s and the current run — North Carolina’s Mack Brown.
The league also enters 2024 with a chip on its shoulder after Florida State finished the regular season as a 13-0 conference champion but was left out of the College Football Playoff; the 2023 Seminoles were the first power conference program to carry that unfavorable distinction. Of course, the ‘Noles have a bit of a complicated relationship with the league at the moment. The school was the first to challenge the Grant of Rights agreement — potentially putting together an exit strategy from the league — by suing the ACC before Clemson followed suit. These things have very little to do with the work being put in during spring practice right now, but the chaos of potential conference realignment looms large around these programs off the field.
So, while the current state of affairs in the ACC is unprecedented and the future is unknown, those things need to be put to the side so we can focus on the coaches, players and storylines that will determine how things shake out in the fall. Let’s dive in to the key spring questions for all 17 ACC teams.
How will Bill O’Brien’s arrival impact Thomas Castellanos? Though he was not the starting quarterback at the beginning of the year, it did not…
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