QB Shaun Hill helped Maryland earn a trip to the Orange Bowl. Eliot Schechter/Allsport
	1   Maryland 2   Florida State 3   North Carolina 4   N.C. State 5   Clemson 6   Georgia Tech 7   Wake Forest 8   Virginia 9   Duke
	46 Number of days between Maryland's final regular-season game and the Orange Bowl, the longest layoff of any team playing in the postseason.
	"Ah boy, it's just tough here. Within a week you lose two great jobs." -- Discredited and unemployed coach George O'Leary to CNNSI.com's Mike Fish, after he resigned at Georgia Tech to become head coach at Notre Dame, then resigned from that dream job after admitting there was false information in his biographical sketch.

Going into the season, the only thing ACC observers knew was that Florida State, as always, would be pretty good. Questions abounded about the league's other eight schools, which had gone through more changes than ever before in the 49-year history of the league, with four new head coaches and eight new offensive coordinators.

A full season later, the Seminoles are no longer infallible and it appears that the athletics directors and head coaches who hired replacements actually knew what they were doing. As a result, the ACC just might be on its way to becoming more than just a basketball conference that is dominated by one football superpower.

We'll find out next year, when Maryland, North Carolina and Clemson go through major rebuilding projects, as Florida State did this year. Will N.C. State, Georgia Tech, surprising Wake Forest or either of those other three be able to challenge the Seminoles, who will be anxious to regain their spot at the top of the league?

The Seminoles -- who missed the national championship game for the first time in four years and will not finish in the top four nationally for the first time in 15 years -- should be back at full strength after losing three receivers to injury in the preseason and struggling to find itself on offense under freshman quarterback Chris Rix. But FSU, which plays Virginia Tech in the Gator Bowl, got better as the season went along and should be at full-strength going into next year, as legendary head coach Bobby Bowden sets out to prove that he can still produce a national championship contender.

The rest of the league got a shot of confidence while the Seminoles rebuilt, and no one in the league office could complain as a record seven conference schools finished the season eligible to play in bowl games. Wake Forest couldn't find a place to go and the league had to scramble to get Clemson in the Humanitarian Bowl, but it was a much better problem than not having enough teams to qualify for all the automatic tie-ins.

But going into next year, who will be able to challenge the Seminoles?

Maryland, this year's surprise ACC champion, is all but certain to lose junior linebacker E.J. Henderson, who will likely cash in his ACC Player of the Year by entering his name in the NFL draft. The offense may still have running back Bruce Perry, but will have some major holes to fill, starting with quarterback Shaun Hill.

Can N.C. State's Chuck Amato, the former Bowden assistant, turn the Wolfpack into a contender with another strong recruiting class? The Wolfpack will have the league's most experienced returning quarterback next season in junior Philip Rivers and a defense that will be even more improved, despite the loss of All-America linebacker Levar Fisher.

Another key question will be how Georgia Tech, picked by some earlier this year to be the team that unseated the Seminoles, recovers from the whole George O'Leary fiasco. O'Leary left to become the head coach at Notre Dame, only to resign two days later after it was discovered that he had lied about his college playing career and his academic record.

The Yellow Jackets, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, appear set to hire former Dallas Cowboys head coach Chan Gailey, currently the offensive coordinator for the Miami Dolphins, to take over the program once the Jackets play in the Dec. 27 Seattle Bowl under interim head coach Mac McWhorter. Athletic director Dave Braine will allow Gailey to finish out the NFL season, something Georgia was unwilling to do last year when it showed an interest in the Georgia native for its coaching vacancy.

By bringing in Gailey, Braine is following in the footsteps the ADs at North Carolina and Virginia, who found candidates with ties to their schools coaching in the NFL. UNC's John Bunting, after a rocky 0-3 start, led his team to the Peach Bowl, where it will face Auburn on New Year's Eve. The Cavaliers struggled with the transition from George Welsh, who retired after last season with more career ACC victories than any coach in league history, to Al Groh, the NFL veteran.

Will Clemson be a factor? The Tigers, once ranked in the top 10, faded badly down the stretch, losing three of its last four games and winding up with an unwanted at-large bid in the Humanitarian Bowl in Boise, Idaho. The bloom seems to be fading for Tommy Bowden, who will enter his fourth season without quarterback Woodrow Dantzler to magically pull the Tigers out of precarious situations.

Duke may not be a factor next year, but the Blue Devils may just be able to win a game in 2002, something they haven't done since beating Wake Forest in 1999.

No young player in the ACC had more of an impact on his team this season than Maryland sophomore tailback Bruce Perry, who went from hardly impressive at all during spring practice to the ACC Offensive Player of the Year. First-year coach Ralph Friedgen awarded Perry the starting job after preseason drills in August and Perry jumped out to an early lead for the ACC rushing title, thanks to five consecutive 100-yard rushing performances to start the season, including an ACC season-high of 276 yards against Wake Forest. Perry eventually became the only the eighth 1,000-yard rusher in school history and the first Maryland tailback to lead the league in rushing since Charlie Wysocki in 1980. He may have been edged out by teammate E.J. Henderson for the league's overall Player of the Year, but Perry will be back next season and will be responsible for keeping the Terps' renewed high football expectations going.		HOT: Top-tier ticket sales ACC teams scored sellouts in its top three bowl games, the Orange, Gator and Peach. NOT: Lower-tier ticket sales The Tangerine Bowl attracted just over 26,000 fans at the 65,000-seat Citrus Bowl. HOT: Alabama fans With Bobby Bowden one win away from tying Bear Bryant on the all-time wins list, Tide fans are a little peeved that the 31 victories Bowden amassed at Birmingham's tiny Howard College (now Samford University) are included in his career total. NOT: Georgia Tech Not only are the Yellow Jackets without a full-time head coach, they will also be without All-ACC tailback Joe Burns in the Seattle Bowl.
Why would an athletics director at a school that hasn't had a winning record since 1995, hasn't been to a bowl game since 1990 and hasn't sniffed a conference championship since 1985 waste money on an insurance policy to pay performance bonuses? Well it seems Maryland AD Debbie Yow had the foresight to renew the $13,000 annual policy she never needed when Ron Vanderlinden was head coach, and now an insurance company is footing the bill for some $300,000 in bonuses that the school promised its coaching staff for winning the ACC championship and qualifying for a BCS game. First-year head coach Ralph Friedgen led Maryland, his alma mater, to a 10-1 record, an outright ACC title and the Orange Bowl, perhaps the greatest success story of the 2001 college football season. And all the financially obsessed Yow has to do is sit back and smile at something that would might have appeared silly before this season began.		Maryland's fans Hungry for postseason action since the Terps' last bowl appearance in 1990, they bought 22,020 tickets for the Orange Bowl. Wake Forest's Jim Grobe The bowl-eligible Demon Deacons didn't get one of the ACC's record six bowl berths, but the first year head coach did get a winning 6-5 record, something his predecessor had only once in eight years. N.C. State coach Chuck Amato and athletics director Lee Fowler They made quite an impression by showing up unannounced on the front doorstep of the Tangerine Bowl, enough to sway electors into picking the Wolfpack over Clemson for the league's fourth-pick bowl game. And, despite some criticism, they were able to hawk a rather impressive 10,100 tickets to the game only 18 days after the selection was announced.
Maryland coach Ralph Friedgen isn't sure how his team will handle the 46-day layoff since the Terps' final regular-season game, a 24-19 victory at N.C. State, when they play No. 5 Florida in the Orange Bowl on Jan. 2. Players report that they feel fresher and more rested after a long season of grueling excitement, as the No. 6 Terps won the school's first ACC title since 1985 and became the first team to win an outright ACC title since Florida State joined the league in 1992. But since no player in the program has ever played in a bowl game before, they have nothing to compare it to. Friedgen, the former Georgia Tech offensive coordinator, knows that such a long vacation can take off any edge the team may have honed throughout the season. He tried to retain that edge through pre-Christmas practices, but there were exams to worry about and a holiday break to deal with and a whole bunch of other stuff that no one in the program has ever really experienced. Friedgen said his team did some contact work, but was not able to have a full-squad scrimmage before it went to Miami. The coach is also a little worried about how his team will respond to the fun and sun of South Florida, where the Terps will be staying in an oceanfront hotel. "Every team is different," Friedgen said. "That's the toughest part of coaching a bowl game -- putting a finger on the pulse of the team. It's a whole new thing [for the players]. The first time they hit South Beach, they might never want to practice again." Of course, the biggest problem the first-year head coach is likely to face is with Steve Spurrier and the Gators, who have been in these situations enough times to know how to handle the distractions and fun of a major bowl game. This is the Gators' ninth straight January bowl appearance, the longest consecutive streak in Southeastern Conference history.
Bowl streaks: Florida State, 20 consecutive bowl appearances; Georgia Tech, five straight; Clemson, three straight; N.C. State, two straight. Back-in: Maryland's bowl appearance is the Terps first since 1990; North Carolina is playing in its first postseason game since the 1999 Las Vegas Bowl. ... Clemson's appearance in the Humanitarian Bowl is the Tigers' 14th in the last 17 years. However, the Tigers are hoping to end a five-game bowl losing streak when they play Louisiana Tech in the New Year's Eve contest. UNC, on the other hand, has won its last four bowl games. ... North Carolina's third string QB, Aaron Leak, and reserve DB, Ronnie Bryant, were suspended from the team after being charged last week with stealing a car in Chapel Hill, N.C. Bryant was being redshirted this season, while Leak saw little action behind Ronald Curry and Darian Durant. Neither player made the trip to Atlanta for the Peach Bowl.