The ACC is loaded with coaches rising and falling through the middle of the power-conference coach rankings
• 8 min read
Stacking the ACC coaches against each other is an incredibly difficult task, and that’s not just because there are now 17 teams in the league after the offseason additions of Cal, Stanford and SMU.
Heading into 2024, the ACC is a wildly disparate league when it comes to coach rankings; it’s easy to pick out a couple names for the top and bottom of a ballot, but voters are left with more than half of the names packed into the middle class of the power conference coaches. There are four coaches among the top 25 of the 68, four coaches in the bottom 12 and a whopping nine coaches occupying spaces between Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson at No. 30 and Georgia Tech’s Brent Key at No. 54.
The differences between coaches in this range are impossible to parse as there is no standard for granting, the length of resume differs wildly and the standards for success change based on the school. Yet every year we try our best, one ballot at a time, to make an annual determination of relative coach ranking.
What we have below is a look back at the 2024 CBS Sports Coach Rankings with only the ACC coaches highlighted and sorted in order. We’ve accompanied that with some analysis based on why they landed were they landed as best we can, along with a note on where each coach stood among ACC coaches in 2023 when applicable.
