Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney doesn’t have a crystal ball, so he can’t say for sure how good the ACC will be as a conference this season. But Swinney’s feeling, when he looks at the teams in the league, is it will be highly competitive from top to bottom.

“We’re going to find out. I don’t know,” Swinney said this week when asked how much better he believes the ACC will be in 2020, not counting Notre Dame, which of course joined the conference for the 11-game season. “We haven’t seen anybody play yet, and there’s always new people that nobody’s seen. We’ve got a lot of players that nobody’s seen, and other teams have the same thing. But my sense is that the league is going to be very strong this year.”

Swinney rattled off a list of teams in the conference that are talented and that he expects to be competitive this season, including seven on the Tigers’ 2020 schedule – Wake Forest, Virginia, Miami, Georgia Tech, Boston College, Florida State and Virginia Tech.

“You look at the quarterback who came from Houston to Miami (D’Eriq King), Miami’s talented,” Swinney said. “I think Coach (Mike) Norvell at Florida State, he’s had great success and he’s got some talent down there. I think what Coach (Scott) Satterfield’s doing at Louisville, I expect them to be explosive. NC State’s been very consistent, Virginia Tech finished strong, Virginia … You can go on and on. I think Georgia Tech’s going to be better. All across the board … I’m interested to see what Coach (Jeff) Hafley down at Boston College is going to be able to do there. I think he’s a great football coach. So, I think all across the board … North Carolina, man, what a season they had last year. They’re just going to be better. Wake Forest, you look at the consistency that they’ve had the last several years — I think they’ve won three out of four bowl games. Duke, you don’t want to play Duke. Coach (David) Cutcliffe is going to always have his guys ready.”

Factor in Notre Dame, and Swinney believes the ACC will represent itself well this season. But just how good the league will be in 2020 remains to be seen once its members take the field this week.

The 2020 ACC schedule is slated to kick off Thursday night when Miami hosts UAB, and 10 other ACC teams, including Notre Dame, are scheduled to play Saturday.

“So, from top to bottom, and then you throw Notre Dame in there, I think this league is going to be really good,” Swinney said. “But how good, how much better, really no way to answer that until we start playing some games and kind of see where everybody is.”

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