ACC football saw four teams reach the 10-win plateau in 2024. Ironically, FSU wasn't one of them, although they entered the season as the No. 10 team nationally.
Two more teams reached the nine-win mark, and the rest of the conference was full of middling to terrible teams barely making bowl games.
There were surprises like Duke winning nine games in Manny Diaz's first year as head coach in Durham. SMU reached the ACC Title game after going undefeated in the conference before allowing Clemson to reclaim their grip on top of the conference.
Syracuse head coach Fran Brown winning 10 games in his first year as a head coach was a surprise. FSU only winning two games goes without saying, and Miami failing to win anything after going all in on their transfer portal haul was something we could see coming a mile away.
The transfer portal makes things more difficult to predict year in and year out as high school recruiting rankings don't mean what they used to because players can leave without playing a snap at the college they signed out of high school.
However, much of the ACC is predictable because most of those teams are not serious about football. They either don't have the resources or are not close enough to fertile recruiting grounds to attract enough top players to make a difference. Will the ACC be any different than it was a year ago? Let's look at who has no chance to compete, who could compete with some luck, the contenders, and if any team could be elite.