The ACC's quest for respect in football is eternal. The fight is starting early in 2026

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Pat Narduzzi is tired of ACC football being a punching bag in the polls and seemingly everywhere else.

The pathologically unfiltered Pittsburgh coach is ready for the league to start punching back.

Narduzzi landed the first but likely hardly the last salvo of the season just moments after the Panthers fended off Virginia Tech on the road Friday night, a game decided on a missed 36-yard field goal as time expired.

In the frantic aftermath, the longest-tenured coach in Pitt history encouraged AP Top 25 voters to “wake your (butts) up," just as Narduzzi promised ACC commissioner Jim Phillips he would after the Panthers improved to 5-0.

Narduzzi wasn't just stumping for Pitt, which did sneak in at No. 25 when the latest poll was released on Sunday, but the entire conference.

What else is there to do after being told before the showdown with the Hokies that it marked the first time two Power Four programs entered a game with identical 4-0 records and neither was ranked?

“It's disrespectful to the ACC,” Narduzzi said Monday.

If Narduzzi sounds a little touchy, maybe it's because he has grown increasingly annoyed about repeatedly hitting the same talking points to an audience not particularly interested in listening.

While he leans into the fight, part of him wonders why one always seems to be necessary.

Well, actually maybe he doesn't wonder.

“I think it’s all the brands,” Narduzzi said, seemingly alluding to the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference. “Everybody wants to look at the logo and gets all infatuated with logos and all that stuff.”

The Big Ten has six teams ranked this week. The SEC has nine. The ACC? Just three: No. 4 Miami, with SMU at 24, one spot ahead of the Panthers.

Narduzzi knows there's a part of him that is trying to have it both ways. He repeatedly said during September that the early season polls don't matter. Yet he knows he's in the minority, and it's much easier for him now at 60 to put the poll in what he considers the proper perspective.

As if to prove a point, he made a not-so-veiled reference to an unnamed program that had a number next to its name earlier in the season, a number that has since vanished.

“I mean, you look at the school down the road gets into the Top 25, and what did they really do to get into the Top 25?” he said.

Asked later who he was referring to, Narduzzi just laughed, though longtime rivals West Virginia and Penn State both fit the profile.

The Nittany Lions and first-year coach Matt Campbell started the season ranked 18th and rose after opening with three uneventful wins against lesser competition. Two conference losses later and Penn State is out of the polls, and Campbell's honeymoon at his alma mater is over.

West Virginia made a cameo in the Top 25 after throttling past Virginia on Sept. 18, only to have its defense implode in back-to-back weeks.

There's still plenty of time for narratives to change, particularly at Pitt, which will have to play the rest of the season without quarterback Mason Heintschel, who tore the ACL in his right knee in the third quarter against the Hokies.

Yet the Panthers are hardly the only ACC team off to a promising start but unable to make serious inroads in an effort to change the perception of the league.

Wake Forest is 4-1, with its lone loss a game effort against the Hurricanes. The Demon Deacons edged an improved Purdue team by two on the road earlier in the season, did the same to disappointing Louisville and crushed Stanford by 54 points on Saturday, the biggest-ever blowout win in conference play for a charter member of the ACC. Duke is unbeaten at 4-0 with a victory at Illinois on its resume.

Neither the Demon Deacons nor the Blue Devils currently find themselves ranked.

Narduzzi tried to spend a rare Saturday off seeing how the other half lives, intending to watch some Big Ten and SEC games. His remote kept finding its way to some of the remaining teams on Pitt's schedule, including North Carolina, which visits Pitt on Saturday.

What he sees, admittedly with some bias, is good football in a league that will spend the next two months beating up on each other trying to keep pace with the Hurricanes, the CFP runner-up last season, who look even better this fall.

“Your stomach starts to turn, and you’re like, ‘Golly, we’ve got a lot of work ahead,’” Narduzzi said.

The ACC would like the conversation around the league to evolve to the point where an in-conference loss doesn't send a team's stock tumbling, a courtesy voters extended to Mississippi State this week, which dropped just one spot after getting drilled at home by SEC rival Alabama by 33.

It doesn't appear to be there yet, as the bid for national relevance instead of national curiosity drones on.

Three years ago, the CFP committee left unbeaten Florida State out of the then-four-team playoff after quarterback Jordan Travis was hurt late in the season. Two years ago, SMU received the lone ACC bid as the 11th seed when the CFP expanded to 12. Last year, Miami shook off a pair of midseason losses to SMU and Louisville that cost the Hurricanes a spot in the ACC Championship to make the CFP as the 10th seed and make it all the way to the title game.

By the time the Hurricanes reached the final, the nip/tuck nature of their at-large bid was largely forgotten.

Yet rather than Miami's success serving as a stamp of approval that the league as a whole is legit, it seems to merely have certified the impression that “The U” is back. The rest of the conference it plays in, seemingly not so much.

So Narduzzi will keep banging the drum, even while facing a stretch run that looks far more daunting without the promising Heintschel.

Maybe Pitt remains in the mix to the end with well-traveled senior Holden Gernier behind center. Maybe it doesn't. The one thing Narduzzi is sure of is that whoever emerges at the top of the ACC standings come early December is worthy of consideration and then some, be it in the polls or anywhere else.

Asked if he feels his almost defiant stance is as much about saying the quiet part out loud for an entire league as it is for the program he's run for 146 games and counting, he nodded.

“Absolutely,” the fourth-longest tenured Power Four coach said. “Absolutely.”

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