ACC’s Coastal Division going out with an appropriately chaotic bang
By human rankings, James Madison, Coastal Carolina and Tulane would all be the best team in the ACC’s Coastal Division, were they allowed in. By computer ratings, Appalachian State would get the nod. Both the eye test and the steely gaze of science would prefer any alternative to the teams actually in the Coastal.
It’s an appropriate level of chaos for the final year of the Coastal, which unlike its Atlantic counterpart has offered both parity and parody over the years. Virginia, in 2019, became the seventh of the seven teams to play for an ACC title, completing the circle of mediocrity. (Virginia lost, the ninth straight for the Coastal representative at that point.)
So Saturday’s game between North Carolina and Miami for pole position in the Coastal doesn’t have the same high stakes that Clemson-Wake Forest did … or N.C. State-Clemson … or Wake Forest-Florida State … or Florida State-N.C. State … or Syracuse-somebody, soon. It’s a war over in the Atlantic, powerful teams slugging it out with their seasons in the balance.
It’s not quite how the other half lives. The best teams in the Coastal would be no better than fifth in the Atlantic, according to both the Sagarin ratings and ESPN’s Football Power Index.
Still, it’s a ticket for a weekend in Charlotte, and someone’s going to have to win the division, by default perhaps. This much is clear at this point: It won’t be either of the Virginia teams, neither of which is the best team in the Commonwealth. And it won’t be Georgia Tech, which got both its coach and athletic director fired midseason.
UNC and The U are the front-runners, clearly, but defending champ Pittsburgh and upstart Duke may still have something to say about this before it’s all over. And it will be a long time before it’s over. The team that wins the Atlantic is almost certainly going to be 8-0 or 7-1. The true epitome of Coastal Chaos — all seven teams 4-4 — probably isn’t on the table given the stragglers, but 5-3 has been good enough to win the Coastal twice (and the Atlantic, oddly enough, way back when) and it might very well be again.
Either way, the odds of a tiebreaker not coming into play seem quite small, which is why so much more is on the line at Miami on Saturday, not that there wouldn’t be otherwise. Despite the loss to Notre Dame, the way North Carolina dispatched Virginia Tech with ease suggests the Tar Heels will be tough to beat; the loss to Middle Tennessee State suggests Miami has everybody fooled again, although the Hurricanes did get better last season after a dismal start.
Perhaps one of those teams will use Saturday as the springboard to an orderly procession to the division title. Perhaps 1-0 Duke’s no fluke. Pittsburgh’s home loss to Georgia Tech feels disqualifying, but it’s only 0-1. And for all we love to talk about chaos in the Coastal, it doesn’t always materialize. As often as not, the Coastal champion has been 7-1 or better — dominant against its peers, if not its rivals on the other side of the ledger.
But it feels like it’s out there, simmering, burbling, lurking. It wouldn’t feel right if the division passed into history without one last nine-step tiebreaker to sort out two 6-2, or a mess of 5-3, teams. Conditions appear ripe, the stars may be aligned, but it’ll take another two months to know for sure — although if James Madison is still outclassing the entire division at that point, there won’t be any mystery about it.
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This story was originally published October 8, 2022 at 6:35 AM with the headline "ACC’s Coastal Division going out with an appropriately chaotic bang."
