2025 season, 16 games in. Ratings and records refresh through the season; nothing here is a preseason guess. Preseason projections →
Best:
Syracuse#20 nationally
Median and standing are by Elo rating, measured against every conference with at least four rated teams.
ACC in orange, the rest of the country in grey. Elo rating, all 136 teams.
Showing 17 of 136 teams in the ACC. Ranks stay national — #1 means first in the country, not first here.
Poll darlings the model is not sold on.
2025 coverage: Elo 136/136 · SP+ 136/136 · FPI 136/136 · SRS 136/136 · CORE off/def 136/136 · schedule 136/136 · AP poll 49. Metrics with no teams yet this season are left out of the table rather than shown as a column of dashes.
Every rating here is bought in except CORE, which we build. How we build it →
Every other column on this page is bought in — Elo, SP+, FPI, SRS and the AP poll all arrive from CollegeFootballData. CORE is the exception. We build it here, from play-by-play, and it is published nowhere else.
It answers a narrower question than a power rating: how good is this team per play, once you remove the situations it happened to face and the opponents it happened to draw? Two teams can post identical yards per play when one of them ran its snaps at a three-score lead against the worst defenses on the schedule. That gap is most of the difference between the two numbers, and every raw per-play stat carries it.
So we remove both, in two stages. First the situation: each play’s expected value is predicted from game state alone — period, clock, score margin, down, distance, field position, home or away, pass or rush — with no team identity in the model at all, and what is left over is the part the situation does not explain. Then the opponent: offenses and defenses form one connected network over a season, so both sides are fitted at once by ridge regression rather than credited separately. Ridge specifically, because in September the schedule graph is barely connected and an unregularised fit hands a huge rating to whoever beat an overmatched opener.
Reported in points per 100 qualifying plays, above average. Offense is better when high, defense when low. Overtime, garbage time, FBS-vs-FCS games, special teams and non-scrimmage plays are all excluded.
⚠ CORE is a measurement, not a forecast. It says what a team has already done per play, adjusted. It does not say who wins next week — that is a separate model, and the two are kept as separate objects on purpose. Full method →
| 4‑82‑6 conf |
| ACC#2 |
| 1320 |
| D77O109 |
| #7711 gm |
| 424 up 4 places since last week |  Stanford | 4‑83‑5 conf | ACC#3 | 1335 | D68O121 | #3412 gm |
| 462 up 2 places since last week |  Boston College | 2‑101‑7 conf | ACC#4 | 1359 | D116O71 | #4111 gm |
| 472 up 2 places since last week |  California | 7‑64‑4 conf | ACC#5 | 1360 | D78O88 | #7312 gm |
| 482 up 2 places since last week |  Virginia Tech | 3‑92‑6 conf | ACC#6 | 1382 | D117O66 | #2311 gm |
| 745 up 5 places since last week |  Wake Forest | 9‑44‑4 conf | ACC#7 | 1531 | D14O89 | #7412 gm |
| 793 down 3 places since last week |  Florida State | 5‑72‑6 conf | ACC#8 | 1556 | D54O14 | #4711 gm |
| 90 |  Georgia Tech | 9‑46‑2 conf | ACC#9 | 1595 | D76O13 | #6312 gm |
| 9214 up 14 places since last week |  NC State | 8‑54‑4 conf | ACC#10 | 1605 | D58O33 | #2912 gm |
| 954 down 4 places since last week |  Pittsburgh | 8‑56‑2 conf | ACC#11 | 1614 | D17O44 | #5312 gm |
| 964 up 4 places since last week |  Duke | 9‑56‑2 conf | ACC#12 | 1622 | D101O29 | #6513 gm |
| 994 up 4 places since last week |  Virginia | 11‑37‑1 conf | ACC#13 | 1637 | D23O61 | #7013 gm |
| 110 |  Louisville | 9‑44‑4 conf | ACC#14 | 1749 | D12O43 | #3912 gm |
| 1131 up 1 places since last week |  Clemson | 7‑64‑4 conf | ACC#15 | 1755 | D50O55 | #4612 gm |
| 1181 down 1 places since last week |  SMU | 9‑46‑2 conf | ACC#16 | 1852 | D38O28 | #6012 gm |
| 130 |  Miami | 13‑36‑2 conf | ACC#17 | 2014 | D5O12 | #915 gm |
