Five years ago, Dabo Swinney stood up in front of his fellow coaches in the Atlantic Coast Conference and urged them to help change the national perception of the conference in football.
For decades, the ACC has been known as a basketball conference and deservedly so with bluebloods such as North Carolina and Duke carrying the torch and winning multiple national championships, while beating some of the best basketball teams in the country along the way.
Swinney has always felt the ACC could be the same way in football if the conference as a whole took the same approach and began playing and competing against some of the best in college football.