If last week was our introduction to the ACC Slate, this is the week it gets into full swing, with every ACC team except for Syracuse facing a conference foe. For the purposes of our little game, this is where catching up is going to start getting harder, because the number of games we have to gain on the front-runners has pretty much just halved. In future weeks, that difficulty might get offset by in-conference matchups being closer-matched than out-of-conference ones, which are literally scheduled by the majority of Power 5 schools to add wins to the schedule — but that latter part hasn’t really been true this year (hello, Virginia Tech and Miami) and the former part, at least if you look at our predictions, doesn’t seem to be taking shape:
The conference’s two ranked matchups are also the only ones drawing any intrigue from our staff.