Well, so Miami isn’t going to steamroll the competition this year on the way to their first-ever ACC title. Louisville brought the Canes crashing back to earth with a 24-21 win over Miami at Hard Rock Stadium on Friday night.
Now, Miami is down from near the top spot in the ACC, and in fact, they don’t control their destiny on the path back to Charlotte for the first time since 2017.
Here’s how things stand in the ACC as of Sunday, October 19.
Naturally, Miami is low because they haven’t played and
won as many conference games yet as most of the rest of the conference. They were too busy beating Notre Dame and putting a beatdown on USF and Florida over the first month of the season.
Now, things shift to a more serious nature, as Miami doesn’t control its own destiny in the ACC anymore. They’ll need at least one stumble from either Georgia Tech or Virginia, and that may not be enough depending on who a loss would be to (I don’t have the tiebreaker scenarios figured out there, as Miami plays neither Georgia Tech nor Virginia).
I will not usurp my colleague Michael Schiffman’s weekly ACC rooting guide. We’ll get into that in the upcoming week. But again, Miami has to now have some form of help to get to the ACC Championship Game.
Oh, yeah, and they can’t duplicate the absolute dog shit performance they put forth on Friday again this season. Because if they do, especially in a tricky road spot like SMU or Pitt, they could be heading home with a season-wrecking loss, and the standings won’t mean bupkis anymore.
It truly is a one-week season each and every week from here on out to reach the lofty goals that fans of this program rightly expect. We’ll see if they can go 1-0 against Stanford on Saturday (which they’d better).
