CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Amid the consternation about the future and present of the ACC — the endless talk about the revenue gap; the speculation over whether the league’s grant of rights will hold; the questions concerning any potential defections — legitimate change has been forgotten in the hysteria. Part of the very identity of ACC football will be lost. The conference’s divisions are going away.
At the conference’s spring meetings in May in Florida, the prospect of a division-less ACC was among the headline topics. Coaches provided daily thoughts on the matter. Jim Phillips, the ACC commissioner, foreshadowed the likely change, which became official in late June. It was the stuff of breathless conversation and debate, perfect for the doldrums of the offseason.
Such chatter seems quaint now, a little more than two months later, given the omnipresent uncertainty surrounding the conference and the entire collegiate athletics enterprise. There are bigger things on the minds of everyone, from financial disparities to conference composition to the very mission of college sports, as Phillips described things here Wednesday.
Yet lost in all of it is that real, concrete change is already known and coming for the ACC. The 2022 season will represent the end of an era (or, an error?). No more Atlantic Division, after this season. And no more Coastal Division, which throughout the past 17 years has provided the league with an immense charm factor, even if that charm has been dispensed to a soundtrack of Yakety Sax.
Since the ACC adopted a divisional format before the 2005 season, the Coastal has never been college football’s best. It has, in fact, more often been the worst among those in a Power Five conference. Yet no division anywhere, it’s fair to say, has been more entertaining or more of a spectacle. No division has been as maddening yet as comforting, for in this chaotic world Coastal Chaos, as it has come to be known, has been a reliable constant.
Some are quite happy to see divisions go, especially those coaches who lead teams in the Atlantic, where Clemson has more or less had its run of the land over the past decade. Every year, ACC coaches would discuss the prospect of eliminating divisions and every year the vote would fall on predictable lines. Dave Clawson, the Wake Forest coach, described it like this on Wednesday during the first day of the league’s annual preseason kickoff event:
“I think if you take the division votes every year, the Atlantic was for eliminating it, and the Coastal was for keeping it,” he said.
The logic isn’t difficult to grasp. The Coastal has been wide open. The Atlantic has not.
Atlantic teams have grown tired of losing to Clemson every year. Coastal teams, meanwhile, have embraced the parity and grown accustomed to the division’s quirks — namely that anybody can win it, and that literally everybody has taken turns winning it over the past decade.
For the final time, Coastal Division coaches and players gathered here on Thursday for an ACC media day. Some of them will be back next year, undoubtedly, and in subsequent years, but it’ll be different. They won’t carry with them the identity of being in the Coastal — college football’s quirkiest and most chaotic division, even if some of them bristled at that description.
“Someone came up with that quirkiness, which I don’t get,” Pat Narduzzi, the Pittsburgh head coach, said here on Thursday. “I don’t really even like it.”
He went on to defend the Coastal’s honor, saying it’s “very competitive” and “kind of fun;” arguing that “you’d like to play in that division, as opposed to the other division, which (is) not as chaotic or whatever you want to call it, that it’s going to be Clemson win the thing, you know.”
Narduzzi, predictably, voted to keep the divisional format, which makes sense given his team’s recent success. The Panthers won the Coastal last season, on their way to defeating Wake Forest in the ACC championship game, and Pitt also won the Coastal in 2018. That divisional championship came during a seven-year stretch in which all seven Coastal teams won the division, starting with Duke in 2013 and ending with Virginia in 2019.
Between those years, Georgia Tech won it in 2014, North Carolina in ‘15, Virginia Tech in ‘16 and Miami in ‘17. The Coastal’s seven different champions during those seven years came to share something in common: They all lost in the conference championship game, and usually lost by especially wide margins: 28 points in 2013; 35 in ‘17; 32 in ‘18.
Still, UNC coach Mack Brown said here on Thursday, “I’m a guy who believed in the divisions. I love having Coastal and Atlantic. I loved having a championship game with the two winners.”
In abandoning divisions, the ACC is adopting a more equitable scheduling model in which, beginning in 2023, schools will play each other more often. Each of the ACC’s football-playing members will play three teams annually, and the other 10 on a rotating basis — five one season and the other five the next, alternating every year.
The 3-5-5 model, as it has come to be known, will address some of the oddities that have long plagued ACC football — like Duke and N.C. State rarely playing despite campuses that are about 20 miles apart, for instance. It will, starting in 2023, result in the ACC’s two best teams playing for the championship — and not provide one of them with an easier path due to a weaker division.
Drake Thomas, the N.C. State linebacker, acknowledged that, at times, he’s wondered about how the Wolfpack might have fared in recent years on the other side of the conference. N.C. State has never won the Atlantic Division which, until last year, Clemson had dominated since 2015.
“Sometimes it’s like, what if we were on that side” of the ACC, Thomas said, referencing the Coastal. “But at the same time, I don’t know — if you want to be the best, you still have to beat the best.”
Last year, for the first time since 2010, a Coastal team proved itself as the league’s best. Pitt defeated Wake Forest in the ACC championship game. And so ended about a decade-long run of futility for the Coastal Division, which along the way became something of a college football punchline. Still, the Coastal is but 5-11 in league championship games.
It has never been home to a College Football Playoff team. Only one of its members, Georgia Tech in 2014, has finished ranked among the top 10 nationally in a final Associated Press poll over the past 10 years. Outside of Virginia Tech’s short-lived run in the mid-to-late 2000s, the Coastal has been mostly known for its parity and its meme-worthy shortcomings.
Larry Fedora, the former UNC coach, once kicked off twice to start both halves of a game. Miami once came back to beat Duke in the final seconds due to an improbable, blooper-reel series of laterals and missed tackles and other tomfoolery during a billion-to-one kind of kickoff return. UNC has found all kinds of interesting ways to lose games in recent seasons. Narduzzi has become a divisional elder statesman only because most of his former divisional colleagues have been fired over the years. These are things that happen in the Coastal, the carnival funhouse of its sport.
Indeed, the Coastal for much of its existence has been like a child’s elementary school art-class drawing — maybe not “good,” exactly, yet charming, nonetheless. And sometimes, if you look hard enough, you might even be able to see the talent and the potential there. That with enough nurturing and patience, there’s promise. And so you hang it on the fridge, anyway, if you’re a supporter of a Coastal team, or at least root for the hope of a divisional championship.
If the Coastal were an island, it’d be the Island of Misfit Toys. If it were a dish, it’d be meatloaf — an easy target yet strangely comforting, if not satisfying and even delicious, depending on the chef and the ingredients. If the Coastal were a baseball team, it’d be the New York Mets — always striving, usually failing, and with the cosmopolitan and more successful Yankees across the river. And if the Coastal were an entertainer, it’d be peak Rodney Dangerfield, cracking self-deprecating one-liners ending in a familiar, yearning punchline.
“I mean, that’s the story of my life — no respect. I don’t get no respect at all, are you kiddin’?”
And now comes one final hurrah. The farewell. The Coastal is almost gone. Long live the Coastal.
