Guessin' season
After a week at ACC media days, the big takeaway is that everyone has great chemistry, the team is like a family, and boy those workout numbers are good.
Programming note: Last week’s newsletter focused on my story on NC State defensive coordinator DJ Eliot and his family in the aftermath of his daughter’s death. Two things I neglected to include in the post…
First, I mentioned that I was working on that story while my mom was getting cancer treatment, but I left that dangling, resulting in like a half-dozen folks asking me about how she was doing. Thanks to all of those folks. You’re good people! And I’m a bad writer leaving a plot thread hanging like that. My mom is doing great. Still getting treatment but improving and feeling good.
Second, if you read the DJ Eliot story and feel compelled to help with the fight against pediatric cancer, they are raising funds for CHOP in Drue’s name, and you can donate HERE.
Last week was ACC media days. Today, I’m flying to Tampa for SEC media days. As Steve Spurrier used to say, it’s talkin’ season. But more than that, it’s prediction season — guessing on preseason rankings and all-conference teams and win totals. You’ll be shocked to learn that all 17 ACC teams have high aspirations after a really good offseason in which the team really came together and dominated their strength program, etc., etc., etc.
I had a good conversation with Manny Diaz and Rhett Lashlee, ostensibly about the league’s new tie-breaker policy, in which they lamented how much preseason rankings — which are just guesswork (educated as they may be) — play into how “strength of schedule” gets calculated, and that now gets added in to metrics used for both tie-breakers and the playoff.1 But here’s the thing: Get rid of the preseason AP poll or coaches poll and a dozen other polls will crop up instead. It’s a vacuum that needs to be filled.
So, with that in mind, here’s my preseason All-ACC ballot and order of finish, with a few notes on key decisions.
QB: Darian Mensah, Miami2
RB: Isaac Brown, Lou
RB: Mark Fletcher, Miami3
WR: Duce Robinson, FSU
WR: Malachi Toney, Miami
WR: Bryant Wesco, Clemson
TE: Jeremiah Hasley, Duke4
AP: QueSean Brown, VT5
OT: PJ Williams, SMU
OT: Brayden Jacobs, Clemson6
OG: Noah Josey, Virginia
OG: Samson Okunlola, Miami
C: Joseph Ionata, Georgia Tech
DE: Clev Lubin, Lou
DE: Mandrell Desir, FSU7
DT: Kemari Copeland, Virginia Tech
DT: Ahmad Moten, Miami8
LB: Sammy Brown, Clemson
LB: Kam Robinson, Virginia
LB: Braylon Lovelace, Pitt9
S: Zechariah Poyser, Miami
S: Jay Green, Stanford
CB: Ashton Hampton, Clemson
CB: Devaughn Patterson, Wake10
K: Aiden Birr, GT
P: Dylan Joyce, Miami
Specialist: Brown, VT11
Predicted order of finish
I will tell you right off, this is an impossible task and entirely pointless. So I’m providing my ranking but I’m also going to split this into tiers to better indicate where I think there’s some real separation.
- TIER 1 -
1. Miami Hurricanes
They’re just the most talented team by a wide margin. Talent doesn’t always translate to results, but it offers a lot more margin for error.
- TIER 2 -
2. SMU Mustangs
3. Louisville Cardinals
SMU is a veteran team with an established QB and a top-tier coach. Louisville’s got a boatload of very good players but I’m not sure, outside of Isaac Brown, how many great players they have, and I’m at least cautious about how QB will look.
- TIER 3 -
4. NC State Wolfpack
5. Clemson Tigers
I really like NC State — top-tier QB, solid O-line, good backfield, improving defense, manageable schedule… and yes, I know this is the type of thing that always burns me. Clemson, on the other hand, is a bit of a mystery, but the on-paper talent is still probably the second-best in the ACC, and Dabo sure loves being able to say “I told you so” to all the folks betting against them.
- TIER 4 -
6. Virginia Cavaliers
7. Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets
Two teams that were very good last year (UVA won 11 games!) but aren’t getting nearly so much attention this year. I think Georgia Tech is going to be a little bit more limited offensively but is going to play a style of football that wears teams down and makes every game winnable — very Iowa-like. Virginia has some really good pieces — O-line, LB, DB — but I want to see Beau Pribula develop as a passer, they’re lacking a bit at the skill positions, and the D-line is a work in progress. The schedule is manageable though.
- TIER 5 -
8. Virginia Tech Hokies
9. Pittsburgh Panthers
10. Cal Bears
Wes Durham loves Pitt this year. I’m a little more tepid, but I do think this will be Narduzzi’s best O-line in years. I really like Cal, but it’s a riskier bet aside from the QB. And everyone seems to like VT, which may be justified but I still think they’re a year away from being a real challenger for a playoff bid.
- TIER 6 -
11. Florida State Seminoles
12. Wake Forest Demon Deacons
13. Syracuse Orange
Talk to Ashton Daniels and you’ll really want to pull for FSU but… I just don’t see it. Wake’s D should be very good again, and the offense should be more dynamic. The schedule is tougher though. Syracuse is hard to pick very high coming off a 3-9 season, but the Orange are the team I think can make the biggest jump this year.
- TIER 7 -
14. Duke Blue Devils
15. Stanford Cardinal
I’m not sure either has a QB to feel good about but both have some other pieces to like (Sheppard, Ford, Hasley, Rose). It’s hard not to pull for Duke to surprise again though, and Tavita Pritchard is just a delight so I have to pull for him, too.
- TIER 8 -
16. Boston College Eagles
17. North Carolina Tar Heels
BC’s roster just looks pretty bleak. And UNC… I think if Travis Burgess can win the QB job and develop quickly under Bobby Petrino, there’s a shot. But if Billy Edwards is your QB with the rest of that roster and the schedule they have this year… I can see it getting very bad, very quickly.
Other notes from ACC Kickoff
I’m a Darian Mensah fan, despite very much not liking how he handled his Duke departure. I’ve talked to him a number of times and always found him to be a smart, thoughtful, introspective guy. So, I was curious how he’d handle the onslaught of questions about leaving Duke for Miami on the final day of the portal window.
The answer: Not well. As I wrote in this story, Darian had some serious revisionist’s history, both suggesting he’d been planning to be in the portal or the NFL all along, and that his time at Duke was actually not very pleasant. Yikes.
“It’s a huge credit to [my teammates] because stepping into [the Miami] locker room was pretty easy. Usually it’s not. At Duke it wasn’t easy to do that,” Mensah told ESPN. “At Duke there was kind of some friction when I first got there because my dollar amount was released. Everybody sees that, and it was just hard for me to be the new guy, and everybody said, ‘Oh you’re getting paid more than me and I’ve been here for X amount of years.’ At Miami, the culture is different, and it just feels like family and actually feels like I’m at home.”
That, tight end Jeremiah Hasley said, is revisionist history.
“No, Darian’s contract was no problem in the locker room,” Hasley said. “He was a great quarterback for us. He earned everything he got. There was never a problem.”
Manny Diaz clarified that Cooper Barkate wasn’t looking to leave Duke either, but once he lost his QB, he felt compelled to jump ship. Diaz said that virtually every starter on his roster got a call after Mensah’s departure news broke, and the team was very close to imploding completely.
Instead, Diaz said, Duke has really rallied around its culture — much like it did after Mike Elko and Riley Leonard’s departures — and this offseason has been really good.
“We’re actually stronger and faster than we’ve been any of the years that we’ve been at Duke,” Diaz said. “We’re significantly faster. Duke guys, they need evidence, and we’re showing them data points that shows this is working.”
Last year, Diaz said, they had 59 guys run 20 mph in workouts and five run 22 mph. This year: 67 ran 20 and 11 ran 22.
Miami’s pursuit of a QB riled up more than just Manny Diaz. Pat Narduzzi told The Athletic that Miami also tried to lure Mason Heintschel into the portal.12 We asked Diaz and Narduzzi why they didn’t turn Miami in, as Clemson did with Ole Miss. The answer: Miami is a lot better at this than Pete Golding was, and they just didn’t have the receipts like Dabo did.
Or, another way of looking at it: Miami might be playing in the gray area, but it didn’t do anything explicitly against the rules. And that underscores what a problem the rules are.
As Diaz told me, in an ideal world, he’s got to fight off other teams coming after his QB every year, because that means his QB was really good. The problem is when the game is rigged in trying to retain those QBs and contracts signed don’t mean a damned thing.
Diaz, a big soccer fan, suggested the only path forward might be transfer fees and an allowance for the schools being poached to go above the cap by the value of the contract being poached.
Talked with Jimbo Fisher for a while on his QB evaluations in the league. He loves JKS, unsurprisingly. So did nearly every coach I spoke with, including a few who eagerly predicted he’d eventually be the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft. But the guy Fisher said he really likes that no one is talking about is Steve Angelli, who is 100% healthy at Syracuse and poised for a breakthrough season.
Speaking of JKS, he said Tosh Lupoi landed in Hawaii on the day he was hired with no heads up, then stayed up talking to Jaron and his family until 4 a.m. JKS loves Cal, and I don’t think he wants to leave — but also, you don’t talk to anyone who seems to think he’ll be there in 2027. I asked Lupoi if it pisses him off that the world seems to fully expect he’ll lose his QB after the season:
It was motivating. Pat McAfee and other folks literally asking where Cal will feed this next great player to. We already shut that down. Jaron’s a Cal Bear right now. It’s about living in the moment, and then we’ll see. There’s some creativity that gets involved there as far as our strategies of how you retain key players. But I came from a culture [at Oregon] where in four years we never lost a single starter to the portal. What we’re doing now, with the culture we’re creating, we’re making sure we’re putting players in position to succeed, and there are things in the works at Cal that we’re going to dramatically improve our retainment.
One other Cal note: RB Adam Mohammed informed me he has Bluey shower curtains in his apartment. He has my Heisman vote now.
And speaking of Syracuse, Fran Brown insists Calvin Russell is making ridiculous progress recovering from his ACL tear, already running hitch routes in sneakers. Brown said he expects Russell to be back some time in October.
We got some one-on-one time with new Syracuse AD Bryan Blair and new Virginia Tech AD Brian White in Charlotte. They both echoed a story I’ve heard at Georgia Tech, Louisville, Virginia and others: We need to modernize and improve quickly. There’s no time for a slow burn because everyone is keenly aware that we’re probably 2-3 years (at most) away from a potentially massive shakeup of college football, where the haves start separating from the have-nots, and you don’t want to be on the wrong side of that line when the music stops.
James Franklin is obviously the key cog in Virginia Tech’s revival, and he wouldn’t be there without the massive new investment in football from the school. But as Franklin told me this spring — and reiterated in Charlotte — that $229 million investment promised last year was benchmarked on what it would take to win the ACC, and he’s not interested in stopping there. He came to win a natty, and that’s going to cost even more.
Justice Haynes gives Georgia Tech an all-important Haynes on the field again, but don’t expect the Yellow Jackets’ offense to look like a copy of the Haynes King era in 2026. First off, Haynes and Malachi Hosley laid down the gauntlet for their production this year. I asked if they were hoping to both get 1,000 yards and they laughed. “That’s a start,” Haynes said.
“We definitely expect more than that,” Haynes said. “We don’t want to be just the best running back unit in the country. We want to be the best unit -- period.”
Meanwhile, Brent Key made a point that he’s hoping to take the pressure off new QB Alberto Mendoza by having him hand off -- a lot.
“Third-and-short isn’t going to be an automatic QB run this year,” Key said.
Stanford’s Tavita Pritchard has many skills. The one we learned about last week: He bakes an amazing looking challah bread. (Sorry Andrea took a photo of a photo so it really doesn’t do Tavita’s baking skills justice.)
As Dabo was leaving our interview room, he prodded our group: “Who’s going to have the guts to pick Clemson in Week 1?” I assured him I was brave enough to pick the Tigers. I just didn’t say which Tigers.
The case of the missing bourbon
To say Dave Doeren can occasionally be grumpy is, perhaps, an understatement. But the recent run of talent being poached from his program had made him especially grumpy, and it’s easy to see why.
“Two years ago, we lost four DBs in the last hour of the portal, all of them starters,” Doeren said. “Three went to SEC schools, one to the Big Ten. One was a Thorpe Award finalist, one a first-round pick. These were good players, and we lost them because they had more money. And that really pissed me off.”
But, being pissed off in this business doesn’t get you far — particularly since everyone else is fairly angry, too. So, Doeren is trying a new approach.
“This year we lost four offensive players. Same thing. They got more money. It doesn’t bother me now,” he said. “I had to reframe it. It’s an opportunity to go find someone that wants to be on our football team, and our chance to help him. We believe in retention more than acquisition because I believe in our development, but I think we just have to evolve in that space or you just become a really negative human being. Now I get to coach different guys, and maybe it’ll work out better. I don’t know, but I know I can’t get mad at something I can’t fix.”
So, how’d Doeren come to terms with this new era of football in which he’ll constantly be fighting an uphill battle?
“A couple bottles of bourbon,” he said, “and a Sturgill Simpson concert.”
How do you not love Dave?
Well, the great Joe Ovies and Joe Giglio tried to make Dave even more chill by offering him a free bottle of Ancient Age bourbon on radio row. Sadly, Doeren was likely already well stocked -- or just has better taste -- and declined. So, the Joes gave it to me instead, knowing that I do not have standards.
Thing is, they gave me the bottle around Happy Hour time, well after interviews had concluded. I went to go stick it in our ESPN interview room, but the door was locked for the night. So, I sat it right next to the door alongside my tripod and work phone, assuming it’d be safe.
The next morning when I arrived: Tripod was there. Phone was there. Bourbon was gone.
What happened?
Well, my pal Chip Patterson suggested that all bourbon is distributed at the digression of the bourbon gods, and wherever it is now, that’s where it was ultimately supposed to be. I like that idea.
Ovies, on the other hand, had a more likely explanation: “I bet Mario stole it. He takes everything.”
Odds and ends
The great Matt Brown did some more exceptional FOIAing and came up with a really interesting list of the schools that earned the most from sponsorship and licensing. The ACC’s leader wasn’t who I expected.
We got some good new additions to our ongoing Twitter series: How short is Andrea Adelson?
When forced to write a story I’ve been putting off, I tend to find new and interesting ways to procrastinate anyway. I can only assume this was one of those times…13
One perk of ACC kickoff in Charlotte… I got to introduce some good folks to some elite QC establishments: Dinner at Supperland and Lang Van and, of course, High Lifes at Thirsty Beaver.
Lashlee also had some playoff thoughts.
Mensah is the obvious choice but this is a deep group of QBs. If you gave me even odds on Mensah or the field winning it at year’s end, I’d go heavy on the field.
Deepest apologies to Nate Sheppard, who was probably the hardest cut of any position.
I really wanted to take Virginia Tech’s Luke Reynolds here, as I think he’s going to be terrific, but my default for preseason all-conference teams is to heavily weigh results rather than predictions.
I have no clue what this position is supposed to be and I hate including it. In retrospect I’d like to take Syracuse’s Demetres Samuel here, as I think he’s gonna be a fun two-way player. But “all-purpose back” on the ballot included QBs, DBs, WRs, RBs, returners… it’s a pointless vote.
Virginia’s McKale Boley was another very difficult omission. I love UVA’s O-line.
This is the spot I feel the least convinced on my vote. Desir ended so strong last year, I have high expectations. But either of the Clemson ends probably would’ve been a safer pick.
There are a lot of positions — DT, safety, RB — where you could easily go with multiple Miami players. One thing about a largely pointless exercise like a preseason all-conference team is, it illustrates which teams have obvious talent. Miami has way more obvious talent than anyone else in the ACC. Whether that translates… you never know. 2024 Florida State looked to be more talented than most, too.
LB is a really deep position this year. Was tough leaving off Matt Rose, Kyle Efford, Mo Tourre, and a number of others.
Two problems with the DBs. For one, Patterson is a first-team All-ACC player, but he’s in a hybrid safety role and shouldn’t be listed as a CB. If I was able to vote for Patterson at S and had a CB spot open, I probably would’ve gone with Syracuse’s Samuel. Also, if we’re including three WRs and two RBs on offense, we need to include five DBs on defense.
No clue why I voted for Brown twice. I wish I hadn’t done that. Also, what is a “specialist”? Why not have a “returner” position? Longsnappers and punt returners are not the same job. Alas.
This is actually a thing Pat had told us, too, but off the record. What did the Athletic do to bribe him into coming clean on the record?!?
Make sure you click on the Twitter link for the full fish team. It’s almost impressive. Almost.