College Football Previews 2025: The ACC

Split Zone Duo: College Football Podcast

Richard Johnson and Alex Kirshner

News, Sports, Sports News, Football

4.9 • 916 Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2025

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Richard and Alex preview 2025 in the Atlantic Coast Conference, discussing the league in the following order:

* Clemson, now with a light sprinkling of transfers, has every ingredient

* Miami’s defense should finally arrive, but will Mario Cristobal come through on the margins?

* Louisville has both of us excited

* SMU is graded on a different curve now, and on that curve, it has work to do

* Georgia Tech is in its best spot since we started podcasting

* Duke might be a better team … with a worse record

* Florida State (coming off a 2-10 season with one FBS win over Cal by five points)

* North Carolina is one of the ACC’s more interesting teams even before you get to the Belichick of it all

* Pitt has offensive firepower, elite linebackers, and a lot to figure out anyway after sputtering to end 2024

* Virginia Tech isn’t out of reasons for optimism, but it’s getting there

* NC State shows worrying signs of a program in decline, but does have a QB of the future

* Syracuse gets a bad schedule draw and will decline in Fran Brown’s second year

* Boston College shows good and bad signs under Bill O’Brien

* Virginia has certainty at QB and uncertainty at a lot of other places

* Cal appears to be heading toward the end with Justin Wilcox

* Wake Forest straps in for a rebuild

* Stanford is interesting for the long term, but check back after 2025

Then we share our nominees for preseason awards: the SZD Dude of the Year, the Low-Key Cool Game of the Year, the Minority Coach of the Week In an Interesting Schematic Spot (of the Year), and the Coach Who’s Not Gonna Be Here Next Year. Producer: Anthony Vito.

Catch up on all of our 2025 previews

We already have previews available for the following conferences:

* Conference USA

* Big 12

* MAC

* Pac-12 and FBS independents

* Sun Belt

Thank you to our subscribers and partners

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.splitzoneduo.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	We're coming and we ain't backing down.
0:01.9	We don't need a bunch of cats in here. Looking in the mirror. Everybody just do your job. You understand that? Hey, were you shut up? I'm bitterly disappointed with the officiating today. Guys being dudes. And they run through our like through a ten horn, man. Ah, fuck it. Alex Kirchner. Season preview season, often my favorite time of the year, the time when we get
0:22.5	back to our roots, get back to basics, where we come back around to the fact that football
0:27.8	is coming.
0:28.8	But there is another harbinger of the season to come that happens every summer here at Splits
0:34.5	Zone Duo, and it's relaunch week, which we just recently completed.
0:38.5	That we did. And all of the evidence that we just completed relaunch week is in your podcast
0:43.2	feeds right now if you were not experiencing it in real time because you were on a summer
0:47.5	vacation or you were doing a summer whatever or you were watching movies or who knows.
0:53.5	We put out six new episodes, I believe, plus a
0:57.9	like 11-minute short history documentary last week. It's kind of our unofficial welcome back to
1:03.5	the season week that we have every year. We renewed our Dead Letters series after a year off
1:08.4	with an episode that I did with our producer Anthony Vito on Miami
1:12.1	University. Also a bonus track in there, extended cut interview for our subscribers at
1:17.2	SplitsendDoer.com. You did a really interesting interview, Richard, with Dan Casey,
1:21.5	coach Dan Casey from the internet. That might have been my favorite thing, actually,
1:25.4	every lunch week. I had never thought about this before, but you two prepped me for a coming reality
1:31.7	where we're going to see more two quarterback offenses because teams don't want to be paying
1:37.6	mid-six figures, low seven figures for guys who aren't playing.
1:42.7	I thought that was very interesting.
1:44.4	I enjoyed the whole week.
1:45.7	Our conference preview series rolled on during relaunch week.
	...

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