Yes, we know it was a win for Georgia Tech. And a well-deserved one. But considering the national prestige of the ACC and the significance of the loss to Florida State to the ACC, the Yellow Jackets’ celebration is a different story.

Two sides of the same coin

Conference commissioner Jim Phillips may have had a small, well-hidden grin on his face when Aidan Birr kicked the game-winning field goal to give Georgia Tech a 24-21 victory over Florida State in Dublin, Ireland. But it was only a fleeting grin. The No. 10 team in the country, the overwhelming favorite to win the ACC, had just been beaten in front of every college football fan.

This is week zero. Only a handful of games are being played, and none of them were at the same time as FSU vs. GA Tech. Everyone saw the conference favorite go down. The Seminoles are 0-1 overall and 0-1 in conference. The pain is ever-present.

The perception problem and family disputes

At the ACC Kickoff in Charlotte last month, Wake Forest head coach Dave Clawson said, “The ACC doesn’t have a football problem. It has a perception problem. And the way to fix that is to win the big games.” Obviously, the idea was to fix the perception problem by winning the big non-conference games. But even in a conference game, the loss of the No. 10 team in the country, a 10.5-point favorite, to a team that’s rated ninth in the conference, exacerbates the perception problem.

Florida State is not on good terms with the commissioner’s office. The school has filed suit in Leon County, FL, to be expelled from the conference. The conference has filed a countersuit in Mecklenburg County, NC, for breach of contract.

FSU has already lost a motion to dismiss the suit in the North Carolina version of the litigation and is awaiting its turn in the North Carolina State Supreme Court next year. The ACC lost a similar motion in Florida and is appealing. Phillips can claim on ESPN that everything is set aside because football is here. But the conference’s appeals process begins in Florida in three weeks. Nothing is moving.

When an undefeated Florida State team won the ACC championship last year but was eliminated from the four-team playoffs, Seminole Nation blamed everyone from the playoff committee to Kirk Herbstreit to ESPN. They also blamed Phillips and the conference office for not fighting hard enough for them to make the playoffs. The attorney general even called for investigations into what “some” saw as a foul conspiracy.

The ACC needs a good FSU

But even if that’s the case, the ACC relies on its star talent to headline the biggest stages.

There will be a lot of “The media didn’t know what to do with their votes before the season.” That will be accompanied by “The conference is completely open, and that’s great.”

The media knew exactly what they were doing. There was every reason to pick Florida State as the best team. The Seminoles could even win the conference. And that brings us to the second point. A “wide open conference” is not good for the ACC’s perception problems. It says there are a lot of good teams, but probably no great ones. The chaos is fun for the fans and, admittedly, for some of the media. But it is not good for the perception problem that Clawson pointed out and that Phillips is trying to solve.

The No. 10 team in the country, the current torchbearer of the ACC, lost in Week 0 and that will be the headline in the CFB for the rest of the weekend. Unless Deion Sanders pulls some other absurd stunt that stretches our changing attention spans.

Phillips can love FSU or be mad at them for everything he’s done for the past nine months. But the reality is he needs them, and Saturday’s game didn’t help him.