Two Rivals Failing To Hold Up Their End Of The Bargain Doomed ACC To Irrelevance
College football is at its best when both of these teams are nationally relevant.
When you think of some of the best rivalries in the history of college football, the Miami-Florida State game has to be one of the first that pops into your head.
At least, it would if you were over the age of 30.
For many young college football fans, the showdown between these two Sunshine State foes has become just another game, and that's sad, because it wasn't always that way.
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From the early 1980s until the mid 2000s, the Hurricanes and Seminoles played in some of the fiercest matchups college football has ever seen, featuring national championship implications and future NFL superstars in every game.
Which is exactly why the ACC saw dollar signs in the early part of the new millennium and decided to make Miami a permanent member of their conference.
Not only that, but when the league implemented a championship game in 2005, they split the divisions up with the sole purpose of having a prospective yearly showdown between the Noles and Canes for conference supremacy at the end of the year.
Ironically, Miami and Florida State have never played each other in the ACC Championship game, and that may be part of the reason why the league has slipped into irrelevance.
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But why?
For lack of a better term: timing.
While Florida State and Miami were both juggernauts in college football at the same time throughout much of the 80s and 90s, by the time Miami joined the ACC in 2004, neither team could maintain any momentum moving forward.
Just one season prior, both teams won their conference and met up in the Orange Bowl as top-10 foes, with Miami squeaking out a win in a 16-14 slugfest.
After that, Miami would not experience another double-digit winning season for the next 14 years, and wouldn't even come close to another national championship until just this past season.
Florida State, conversely, would experience ebbs and flows throughout the next two decades.
There were highs, like their 2013 national championship win and their undefeated 2023 regular season, but there were also lows, including their late 2000s lull in the dying days of the Bobby Bowden era and their current woeful state.
When the Seminoles seemed to catch their stride, the Hurricanes would be stuck in the mud, and now that the Canes are back to national prominence, it's the Noles who are failing to hold up their end of the bargain.
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In 2004, Florida State and Miami were two of the biggest brands in college football; national powerhouse programs destined to do battle for the rest of time, and acting as a rising tide to lift all the other boats in the ACC.
Unfortunately for the ACC, that never came to fruition, and although Clemson tried their best to drag the conference kicking and screaming into the 2020s, they too have fallen off, leaving the league as irrelevant as ever.
Who knows what will come in the next 20 years.
The Canes seem to be back to at least being a consistent winner. If the Seminoles can shed the dead weight that is Mike Norvell and his outlandish contract, perhaps they too can get the train back on the tracks and give the ACC what they craved all the way back in 2004 when this experiment started.
It sounds cliché to say, but college football is at its best when both of these teams are nationally relevant, so here's hoping these two can resume the intensity of their rivalry from decades past.
They might just save a dying football conference in the process.