Life in the ACC certainly isn't boring. In the past year alone, the conference has produced a long and awkward CFP rankings battle , an irate affiliate member , a thrilling national title game run , the strangest tiebreaker result imaginable , an out-of-nowhere 11-win season , the most disappointing team in the country , an epic pro-to-college face-plant , 18 of the 38 best games of the 2025 season , the No.
1 pick in the NFL draft (indirectly) and the most awkward possible move to nine-game conference schedules. That sets a high bar for the 2026 season, but we have quite a bit to look forward to.
We get another mammoth Miami-Notre Dame game (though we have to wait until November for it this time), redemption efforts from both Clemson's Dabo Swinney and North Carolina's Bill Belichick (and, kind of, Florida State's Mike Norvell), James Franklin's debut at Virginia Tech, and a potentially very bitter game between the defending conference champs and the contender that stole their star QB. And even if Miami actually delivers for the entire regular season for once and claims one of the spots in the ACC title game, the battle for the other spot could be ridiculously wild.
More than half of the conference's teams can convince themselves they're a contender, and someone unexpected will probably be right. This isn't the best power conference, but it might be the silliest.
(I mean that at least 70% as a compliment.) Let's preview the ACC! And because Notre Dame is still sort of a member, we'll preview the Fighting Irish here, too.
2025 recap A 17-team conference with eight-game conference schedules was bound to produce silly results. Duke lost to both Tulane and UConn out of conference but sneaked into a five-way tie for second place at 6-2 in ACC play.
And despite losing their only game against another 6-2 team, the Blue Devils managed to not only grab the second spot in the ACC championship game but win it over Virginia with a brilliant early surge and clutch plays in overtime. It was a weird result befitting a weird season, but even though the Blue Devils were not ranked by the College Football Playoff committee, the ACC still got a team in the playoff field thanks to Miami's at-large selection.
The Hurricanes then proceeded to come within a minute of winning the national title. Continuity table The continuity table looks at each team's returning production levels (offense, defense and overall), the number of 2025 FBS starts from both returning and incoming players and the approximate number of redshirt freshmen on the roster heading into 2026.
(Why "approximate"? Because schools sometimes make it very difficult to ascertain who redshirted and who didn't.) Continuity is an increasingly difficult art in roster management, but some teams pull it off better than others.
With almost the entire conference between 49% and 62% in returning production, there might not be many huge advantages to be found here. But it's still interesting that James Franklin was able to generate the No.
4 overall ranking considering how much turnover coaching changes tend to prompt these days. 2026 projections The hierarchy is pretty clear here, with Notre Dame and Miami leading the way.
But among actual ACC teams, only 7.1 points separate second-place Clemson from 10th-place Duke, and no team is projected so low that it can't hope for a lightning-in-a-bottle run at seven or eight wins. (OK, runs from BC and Stanford would be pretty surprising in that regard.) Miami avo