Earlier in the offseason, college football experts from CBS Sports and 247Sports participated in a voting process that powers our annual CBS Sports coach rankings. Those rankings take every Power Five coach and line them up from No. 1 to No. 65, but now it’s time to use those same results to zoom in on how things look within each of the power conferences.
In the ACC, the separation that Clemson has created with two national championships and six conference titles since 2015 is represented in Dabo Swinney being the only coach who falls in the top 15 nationally. However, after a year that saw Clemson not win the Atlantic Division for the first time since 2014, the coach rankings see a pair of Dabo’s division foes move up in Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson and NC State’s Dave Doeren.
The biggest storyline from an ACC-specific look at the CBS Sports coach rankings is the turnover we’ve seen in the past year. Duke, Miami, Virginia and Virginia Tech all underwent coaching changes this past offseason with three of those four jobs going to first-time head coaches. Our voters have historically started all first-year coaches near the bottom, so it’s provided a fairly predictable top, middle and bottom tier when you break out the ACC on its own.
So let’s dive in, and do remember this is a ranking that’s been extrapolated from our full CBS Sports Coach Rankings, which you can access in the links below.
Complete Power Five coach rankings: 1-25 | 26-65