East Carolina Is A Better ACC Team Than Most ACC Teams

There were two things we learned during the East Carolina/Virginia Tech tilt that opened the season. One: Virginia Tech isn't the tenth-best team in the country when Sean Glennon is the quarterback. Two: East Carolina is doing a better job of being a competitive ACC team than most of the conference's charter members. Don't get me wrong- it's not like this is some new jack program coming out of the Sun Belt to pull shocking upsets against titans of football competence. But in the "get enough conference wins to get a plane ticket to Boise or San Francisco" sort of way, the Pirates are definitely passing muster.

Witness last season: ECU snagged two conference wins against NC State and Virginia, and they were rather convincing. Granted, both NC State and UVA were teams that missed out on the postseason, but both were prone to multi-week spans of bowl-team level competence. And now this year; a close loss on the road to a team that America as a whole was rooting for, and this past weekend's result, a 37-34 win against Butch Davis' UNC squad, which has shown surprising amounts of friskiness on the offensive front.

It's worth wondering if this is just another example of the ACC failing to take care in what they wish for. First, Jim Swofford pirated Miami and Virginia Tech and then Boston College for (let's face it) 95% football reasons, leaving many to wonder aloud whether the Big East even deserved a BCS bid. Now, in Louisville (fresh off a rather symbolic shaming of Wake Forest in the Orange Bowl), West Virginia (passed over for ACC expansion because it supposedly didn't fit the conference's academic profile) and Rutgers (during Greg Schiano's initial recruiting classes, Virginia in particular found itself embarrassed for losing prospects to them), they have three more legit title contenders than the ACC, with South Florida making serious gains. But a Conference USA team that hasn't been ranked since, I dunno, Jeff Blake's heyday? (EDIT: ECU was ranked #23 in 1995, three years after Jeff Blake was drafted). Should the ACC sit out the BCS out of shame this year, like when Notre Dame turned down stuff like the Independence Bowl?