The ACC is college football's best conference, Florida State's Jimbo Fisher says

CHARLOTTE — The Southeastern Conference’s football coaches usually are the ones tossing around phrases like this, bold statements boasting about their league’s place at the pinnacle of the sport.

But, Thursday at the Atlantic Coast Conference media days, Florida State’s Jimbo Fisher did the bragging on behalf of the ACC — and backed it up with a rather convincing argument.

“We’ve established ourselves as, I think, the premier conference in college football,” Fisher said, unprompted, in a news conference.

When asked to elaborate, he pointed to the ACC’s two national championships in the past four years (Clemson in 2016 and Florida State in 2013) and two Heisman Trophy winners (Louisville’s Lamar Jackson and the Seminoles’ Jameis Winston) in the past three years.

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“Two of the last four national championships have come from here; we`ve played for three of them,” Fisher said. “We’re 8-3 in (College Football) Playoff games … Our non-conference records against the SEC, the Big Ten and everybody else, we have the winning-record Power Five wins. You have two Heisman Trophy winners and also the runner up last year. You have six coaches in the top 20 all-time winning percentage in college football. You go down the list of everything, and I think the importance of it.
“I coached in the SEC for 13 (years) — I think it's a tremendous conference. I think the Big Ten is a tremendous conference. I think they all are. But I think right now what we`ve accomplished in the last five years and you're talking about major wins, big wins, national championships, Heisman Trophy winners, coaches, everything that goes involved, I think the ACC is as good a league as there is in football, I really do.”

Fisher’s division — the ACC’s Atlantic — could even lay claim to be the toughest division in the sport, at least at the top, considering how strong Florida State and Clemson have been over the past five years, along with Louisville’s recent surge. While there are valid points to be made, the Big Ten East may quibble with that distinction, and the SEC West would never give up that claim without a fight, either.

Earlier on Thursday at SEC media days, Auburn coach Gus Malzahn even went so far as to say “The West right now is the best league in college football; it's a man's league.”

Alabama certainly is, and remains, among the best individual programs in the country. But no other SEC team (West or East) finished last season with fewer than four losses.