It’s a Coastal preview and not an ACC one because the Coastal is our football conference.  When entire recruiting classes will never play Florida State or Clemson, and entire decades go by without them visiting, you’re in a loose scheduling arrangement, not a conference.

By now the Coastal Division’s reputation for chaos borne of mediocre football is well-earned.  It doesn’t get more chaotic than six years, six different champions – or more mediocre than all of them losing in the ACC championship game.  With seven teams in it, that leaves one more left out and needing to win it this year to bring the whole thing full circle.  (No prizes for guessing who.)

Last year was as emblematic as any.  North Carolina was 1-7 in ACC play; their only win was Pitt, the Coastal champion.  Go figure.  It doesn’t get any less nuts this season, with three of the seven teams breaking in new coaches.  I’m going to try and actually make a little sense of it, with power rankings at the end, but pulling names out of a hat one by one is as likely as any other method to be accurate.  Here’s the summary on the competitors in 2019:

Duke

Coach: David Cutcliffe (12th season)

By far the dean of Coastal coaches, Cutcliffe has settled into a nice routine, which played out perfectly last year: Be just a little bit better than their cushy-soft out-of-conference schedule, then scrape together a few ACC wins and go to a crappy bowl against a crappy opponent.  This year looks to be more of the same, as – HAHA NOPE they’re getting Alabama’ed in the face to start the season.  Duke won’t be able to ride their nonconference to bowl eligibility this year, with the Crimson Tide to get things started and Notre Dame later on.

Duke also has to replace NFL 1st-round pick Daniel Jones at quarterback, which is bad news for Duke but possibly just as much so for UVA, since Jones did his best Ronald Curry impression by never beating the Hoos.  Quentin Harris is a capable runner and threw seven TDs last year against only one pick, so he has a good chance to give Duke a relatively seamless transition.  The Blue Devils maintain continuity in a lot of other areas, too – a solid but unspectacular running game and a respectable bend-but-don’t-break pass defense.  They didn’t come up with big plays against other pass offenses last year – only four picks, and no one player had more than 3.5 sacks – but they did keep opponents under 55% completion and forced them to use a lot of plays to move down the field.

Still, bowl eligibility rests on beating a couple teams that they didn’t last year.  The OOC schedule provides only a couple likely wins, which means they need to improve by at least one their conference win total from 2018.

Georgia Tech

Coach: Geoff Collins (1st season)

The most seismic system change in college football is taking place in Atlanta this year.  Paul Johnson has retired and taken his service-academy offense with him, leaving the Jackets to figure out a more standard attack.

That starts with quarterback, where as of the beginning of camp nobody has any idea what the hell.  Tobias Oliver was the backup last year, and he played enough to run for 876 yards while throwing the ball…..16 times.  It’s either him or one of three guys who’ve never thrown a collegiate pass, one of whom is a redshirt junior.  This feels like the kind of situation where a veteran starts the season and a freshman finishes it.

GT’s defense last year was…..fine.  Neither very good nor very bad.  Unremarkable in all senses, actually – it stood out for no reason at all except maybe being a little weak against the pass.  A new system will rear its head here, too, and that plus a lot of turnover will probably mean a regression on this side of the ball too.  Collins is a defensive coach, however, and the change won’t be as jarring.

The Coastal power rankings are not easy to figure out and you could make a case for almost any configuration.  Almost.  This one’s a little easier than most, however.  GT has to play Clemson and Georgia every year, they weren’t all that great last year, and now they’re undergoing a massive regime change with a lot of turnover and no quarterback with any kind of track record to speak of.  They’re going to be at the bottom of the list, and bowl eligibility is a near-impossible dream.  GT may well surprise people in the coming few years, as UVA is doing now, but the first one will be rough.

Miami

Coach: Manny Diaz (1st season)

Because everything at Miami has to include drama, Manny Diaz took over for the retired Mark Richt 17 days after being hired at Temple.  (In between, of course, the early signing period, which is 1: when all of Temple’s recruiting class signed their LOIs and 2: why the early signing period is a complete asshole of an idea.)  Diaz spewed some nonsense about how he hoped everyone at Temple understood the pull of coming home, which was a funny thing for a Florida State grad to say.

At least, from Miami’s perspective, they hired the architect of the non-crappy half of their football team.  Miami started last season ranked #8 and finished it on the wrong end of a 35-3 bowl game whupping from Wisconsin.  In between was 13 games of godawful quarterback play, regardless of whether N’Kosi Perry or Malik Rosier was taking the snaps.  The defense, coordinated by Diaz, was stingy, particularly against the pass.  That’s likely to continue this year.  Diaz gets back a good chunk of his talent and filled in the holes with a sizable amount of transfers, notably including former Hokie Trevon Hill.

The biggest step in fixing the offense came with the transfer of Tate Martell from Ohio State.  Martell will be eligible to play right away because lawyers (specifically, Ohio State’s coaching change was considered a hardship by the NCAA because a lawyer told them so instead of Martell himself; listening to players isn’t the NCAA’s strong suit.)  Martell is an actual dual-threat, not the kind Miami had last year for whom throwing could only charitably be considered a threat.

Miami’s biggest obstacle this year will be expectations.  Because they’re Miami, they have talent, and because they’re Miami, that talent is at risk of being overrated, much like last year.  If Martell makes an immediate difference, the Canes are a favorite for the division title.

North Carolina

Coach: Mack Brown (1st season)

Larry Fedora looked like he had something going for a while there.  Until 2017.  The last two years, UNC has gone 1-7 in ACC play, triggering the second Mack Brown era in Chapel Hill.  Carolina wasn’t a disaster in any facet of the game last year; they just weren’t good at anything, and that led to a two-win season and Fedora getting canned.

Mack Brown will be 68 when this season starts, so he’s not here for a long-term solution.  If they get 10 years out of him they’ll be doing good.  Brown’s age and time spent out of the coaching profession make him the target of some derision, as if maybe the game has passed him by, and maybe it has.  But if you view Brown’s role as more of a CEO and less with rolled-up sleeves, the hire makes sense.  Brown has surrounded himself with much younger minds – his OC and DC put together some pretty good resumes at Ole Miss and Army, respectively.  He brought back program star alum Dre Bly to recruit, coach his old position and recruit.

It’s kind of an experiment, of the sort that worked exquisitely well at Kansas State.  Brown doesn’t have to turn UNC into a powerhouse himself, he just has to right the ship and get people thinking of UNC as a quality program.  (If his players go to class at the same time – bonus!)  This year could be tough, because Brown has to replace huge chunks of his defense and rebuild the offense from the ground up.  Every quarterback on the roster is some variation of a freshman.  (They do have a potential ace in their pocket in true freshman Sam Howell, who enrolled early at UNC after being pursued by everyone who’s anyone in college football.)  A couple pieces exist among the skill positions, but nothing to blow you away.

It’s North vs. South Carolina in the first game of the season (in what ought to be an annual battle to see who is allowed to be called “Carolina” that year) and that game will be a bellwether for the Heels’ season.  If they win, or at least severely threaten to, then the Coastal could have a dark horse contender in baby blue.  Otherwise, the Heels have to play Clemson this year, and bowl eligibility is likely to be an uphill climb.

Pittsburgh

Coach: Pat Narduzzi (5th season)

Surprise.  Pitt lost early to UNC last year, got blown out by a not-that-great Penn State team, and as UNC spent the rest of the year backsliding, everyone kept looking at the Pitt game on their schedule and saying “we got this.”  No they didn’t.  When the dust settled, Pitt was the division champ – without even having to fuss with tiebreakers.

Pitt’s biggest question is how to duplicate the fearsome run game they had last year, since they’ve lost not one but two 1,000-yard rushers.  That was the alpha and the omega of their success last year, combined with a passing attack that was just efficient enough.  Kenny Pickett returns under center again, and he’s got most of his weapons back, an all-name-team powerhouse including Maurice Ffrench, Taysir Mack, V’Lique Carter, and Shocky Jacques-Louis.  Pitt returns most key defensive pieces as well, and Narduzzi was the architect of a tough-as-nails (and sometimes crossing the line) defense at Michigan State and knows how to stop the other team.

It was no secret that when Pitt hired Narduzzi, that MSU program was what they were looking to emulate.  So far they’ve largely been able to do so, with last season being a little bit of an affirmation – but they’ve also never lost fewer than five games a year under Narduzzi.  But the hallmark of MSU these days is that, unlike in the past, their success hasn’t been fleeting.  In order to take that next step, this season will be huge for them.  They’re UVA’s season opener in a game that will immediately help line up the contenders in the Coastal.  It also wouldn’t hurt if they could get over the hump and beat Penn State.  Pitt is likely to return to postseason play, but the quality of play they end up with is still up in the air.

Virginia

Coach: Bronco Mendenhall (4th season)

(You know this stuff already, but I’m doing this anyway, in the same style of all the other teams, just for juxtaposition.)

When a team goes from a decade of bottom-feeding to contending, there’s a season along the way where a lot of their wins are considered big upsets, and they get picked last but finish much better than that.  That was last year for UVA.

Bronco Mendenhall, having established his coaching chops at BYU, doesn’t need to prove to the media that last year was a fluke.  UVA is the new hotness, partially because of Mendenhall’s track record, and partly because of last year’s bowl win, a 28-0 wasn’t-really-that-close shutout of South Carolina.  SEC teams are always expected to outclass their nonconference opponents (particularly by their own fans), so when one of them gets pantsed like that, people pay attention.  And UVA returns almost every defender from that bowl win, leading people like Phil Steele to call the Hoos “one of the nation’s best defenses.”

With Bryce Perkins returning at QB, the main question is whether UVA can replace the versatile playmaking skills of bowl MVP Olamide Zacchaeus.  Some promising candidates exist, but the offense probably won’t be as dependent on the one dynamo as it was.  That could be either good or bad.  But, Perkins will make a very strong case for the division’s best quarterback – maybe even the ACC’s – and the Hoos will expect to go bowling again and be right in the thick of the race for the division crown.

Virginia Tech

Coach: Justin Fuente (4th season)

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

This is a talented team.  They found a quarterback last year in Ryan Willis – not a great one, but he’s efficient and can run.  Most of the offensive firepower returns, and the defense is mostly intact.  (That said, they were pretty terrible on defense, so maybe that’s not a good thing?  Still, continuity matters in college football.)  On paper, the Hokies have the talent and continuity to contend.  And a good recruiting class will reload the pipeline fairly well.

But.  They were riddled with departures last year, not all of them voluntary.  The aforementioned Trevon Hill was kicked off the team for basically arguing with the coaches all the time.  Word leaks out from time to time that Fuente is not well liked.  This will be DC Bud Foster’s last season.  Foster is 60 and certainly has coaching years left in him – is that simply retirement age for a VT lifer who can certainly enjoy a comfortable retirement, or is the relationship between him and Fuente not quite what it should be?  Tech is slowly backsliding and needed about 10 plays to go precisely their way last year in order to keep the win streak over UVA intact.

Last season could’ve been a blip.  Tech is talented enough to not have to 6-6 their way into the postseason.  It could also have been a sign of gathering storm clouds.  This season will likely either be a rebound in a big way, or Fuente’s last.  Tech isn’t going to spend two years going 1-7 like UNC did; they’ll either win this year, or cut bait quick.

Power rankings

In this division, anything goes.  Ranking the teams beforehand is not easy; there are four teams who could legitimately win it and another three who might, at any given time, trip those four up.  Giving it a shot…..

1. Miami
2. Virginia
3. Pittsburgh
4. Virginia Tech
5. Duke
6. North Carolina
7. Georgia Tech

Miami will probably be good.  UVA will probably be good.  Pitt and VT are wild cards – they could win it, or they could just go thud.  Duke is always well-coached, making them unpredictable since new contributors come totally out of nowhere.  UNC will probably upset someone, but who can tell who?  GT is undergoing too much transition to be a major threat this year, but that’s a band-aid that had to be ripped off sooner or later.

If the top two teams really are Miami and UVA, life will be interesting and more fair than usual, since the two teams have the same crossover games.  The gorilla in the room known as Clemson, on the other hand, is only on the schedule of the two (as of these power-rankings) bottom-feeders.  The Atlantic may be just as unpredictable as the Coastal, which only helps to create a positive feedback loop of chaos.  A fun season in the ACC is in store.