College football in North Carolina is struggling. What are the reasonable expectations?

Anyone who’s a fan of a North Carolina college football team had to have a couple of thoughts Saturday night, if they were watching the Alabama-Georgia game. And it’s not hard to imagine what those thoughts were.

Thought No. 1: Wow — this is an incredible college football game.

Thought No. 2: The team I root for (North Carolina, N.C. State, Duke, Wake Forest, ECU, etc., etc., etc.) has no shot, ever, of competing at this level.

And you know what? It’s true, on both counts.

Indeed, the Crimson Tide’s victory made for incredible theater. Alabama raced out to a huge lead. Georgia came back and took a late lead, itself. The Tide went back ahead on a dramatic touchdown pass and reception that will be replayed forever. Georgia threatened. Alabama held on.

Amazing. What a game. Big-time college football at its best.

But also: something of a reality check, if your rooting interests lie with any school in North Carolina (or, really, if your rooting interests lie with a lot of schools that aren’t, say, among the half dozen or so with a real chance of competing for a national championship in any given year).

As great as the Alabama-Georgia game was, it also underscored the truth that a select few schools, at the very top, are simply playing a different sport than everyone else. The version of college football those teams played in Tuscaloosa was not the same as, say ... what UNC and Duke offered in Durham earlier in the day. Or what N.C. State and Northern Illinois offered in Raleigh.

Or Wake Forest-Louisiana. Or ECU-UTSA.

And the list goes on.

And yes, college football has always been this way, to a degree, with a few teams at the very top of the sport separating themselves. Miami of the 1980s. Florida State of the 1990s. Those Urban Meyer-led Florida teams of the mid-to-late 2000s. A lot of Nick Saban’s Alabama teams. Clemson, at its peak, in the not-so distant past.

But doesn’t it feel like the best teams are somehow even better than they used to be, relative to the rest of the sport? Doesn’t it feel like the gap is somehow widening between the UNCs and N.C. States of college football, and those schools at the very top? Shoot, the Wolfpack thought it had put together a team capable of competing with the best of the best this season — and then lost by 41 against Tennessee, before suffering a similarly lopsided defeat at Clemson.

The question has to be what is the reasonable hope for a lot of schools playing FBS college football, because competing nationally at the highest level is out of the realm for the vast majority of them. It’s just never going to happen for about 90% of these teams, and that might even be a generous estimate of the schools capable of reaching that level.

A lot of the focus these days among fans and media is on that widening revenue gap, attributable to television money, between the Big Ten and SEC and everyone else. And undoubtedly, it’s significant. It’s why Florida State and Clemson are trying to sue their way out of the ACC. But here’s another truth, too: No amount of TV revenue is transforming a lot of these schools into some kind of football power.

UNC, which surrendered a 20-0 lead against Duke on Saturday, hasn’t won the ACC since 1980. N.C. State hasn’t won it since 1979. It does not look like that drought will end this season. Duke hasn’t won it since 1989, when the Blue Devils finished in a tie with Virginia. Wake Forest last won it in 2006, which is downright recent compared to the rest of the ACC schools in this state.

But for different reasons, none of these schools really has all that much of a chance of ever reaching the sort of level we witnessed in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on Saturday night. And that’s perfectly OK. But in this football-mad era, in which school and conference administrators and practically everyone else seems to be going all-in on prioritizing the sport, it begs the question of why schools are throwing tons of money at something that’s ultimately a losing enterprise (or, at least an enterprise that is going to end up causing a lot of frustration, the vast majority of the time).

And also, on a similar note: At what point do fans stop propping up a sport — through television viewership, booster contributions, NIL donations, buying tickets and everything else — that is so exclusive, and growing more so? The few schools at the very top of college football are simply playing a different game. And it can be wildly entertaining and compelling, as Alabama and Georgia proved. But it’s a different game, nonetheless, and the gap between them and everyone else is only growing.

If the goal of college football is to become a two-conference version of the NFL then, well, good luck with that. Such a thing just doesn’t seem sustainable. Part of the sport’s draw has always been that your school — any school — might just have a shot at glory, regardless of how much of an illusion that’s always been. But now, it’s growing more and more impossible to believe that illusion. And the people running the sport seem to want it to become even more geared toward the elites.

ONE BIG THING

Meanwhile, the Blue Devils are partying like it’s 1994 again. Bring back those puffy Starter jackets. The Zubaz pants. Call your friends on their home telephones, and ask whomever picks up if Johnny is there, because you’ve got some news to share: Duke is 5-0, with victory No. 5 coming in dramatic, come-from-behind fashion Saturday against UNC.

Indeed, this is the first time Duke has won its first five games since ‘94. Last time it happened, 30 years ago, Fred Goldsmith was head coach. Manny Diaz, Duke’s current head coach, was a 20-year-old college student at Florida State. The schedule toughens from here, but the Blue Devils are owed their due, especially after that gutsy rally against a rival on Saturday.

THREE TO LIKE

1. The aforementioned Blue Devils, showing some grit.

An understandable thought manifested early Saturday evening at Wallace Wade Stadium, while Duke dug itself into a 20-point hole against the Tar Heels. That thought: Well, looks like Duke’s first four wins came against some pretty suspect teams. And that’s probably true. Nonetheless, the Blue Devils came alive over the final quarter and a half, and rallied for a memorable 21-20 victory. The Victory Bell is back in Durham for the first time since 2018, and it’s a darker shade of blue.

2. Salty Dave is back.

Is there a coach anywhere who likes poking his fans more than N.C. State’s Dave Doeren? It has to be something of a bit these days, with Doeren leaning into character. And, in fairness, he showed some modesty after those lopsided losses against Tennessee and Clemson. But after something of an uninspired victory against Northern Illinois Saturday, there he was, with a classic Dave-ism: “Don’t be mad about winning,” he said. And you know what: He’s actually right. Would you have rather lost, State fans?

3. The vibe of Duke’s “Devil’s Deck.”

For a lot of folks around here (me included), Saturday offered a first-look, of sorts, for Duke’s new fan-centric “Devil’s Deck” — a space for spectators to gather, hang out, eat, drink, play cornhole and occasionally maybe even watch the game going on down on the field. The space replaced what normally had been swaths of empty or lightly-filled seats. The deck works. It looks fun. It adds to the environment. More and more schools will likely be adding amenities like it. This is the future.

THREE TO ... NOT LIKE AS MUCH

1. A meltdown of a different kind for UNC.

The debacle at home against James Madison was bad. Historically so. Blowing a 20-point second-half lead at Duke on Saturday somehow felt worse for the Tar Heels. Mack Brown is arguably the best coach in school history. He has done a lot for UNC. He brought stability and hope when he returned in late 2018. But the trends are not good here, and fair or not it’s looking more and more like his second tenure at UNC will not end well.

2. Florida State: an ACC embarrassment.

So, to recap: The Seminoles are attempting to sue their way out of a conference its administration and fans claim to be beneath them, but now FSU is 1-4 after a 42-16 loss against SMU? Got it. There’s some kind of irony here, or at least a hilarious juxtaposition: FSU is trying to leave the ACC because it thinks it deserves more money. SMU, meanwhile, agreed to take no share of conference revenue for seven years, just to be a part of the ACC. Maybe FSU should try asking for less.

3. Maybe Clemson shouldn’t have played that game.

The first season of this new coast-to-coast ACC has actually gone better than anticipated. Cal has been an entertaining and good fit. SMU is proving worthy. But this weekend underscored the challenges of this cumbersome arrangement. For one thing, Stanford had a heck of time making it to Clemson, given the catastrophic effects of the remnants of Hurricane Helene.

But more than that, maybe Clemson shouldn’t have played that game, anyway, with so many nearby communities under water, and devastated. It wasn’t about whether the game could be played, remember — but about how many resources (in public safety, especially) hosting a game requires, that could have been diverted to places in need.

THIS WEEK’S BEST PROGRAM IN THE STATE

Look, this category is an inside joke about the uproar that resulted a couple of years ago when I wrote that Appalachian State had the best college football program in the state — but it’s not going to work anymore if only one team (Duke) is actually worth mentioning. And yet ... that’s what continues to happen. UNC can’t get out of its own way. N.C. State has, um, not looked all that great. Wake Forest is going through it. ECU and App State and Charlotte are not standing out.

So Duke it is, again. Can anyone else in North Carolina rise to the occasion? (And yes, we see you, Pirates, with the nice victory against UTSA on Saturday.)

CAROLINAS RANKING

1. Clemson (don’t look now, but the Tigers have done nothing but blow people out since that Week 1 loss against Georgia); 2. South Carolina (can’t win during an off week but, even better — can’t lose, either); 3. Duke (can the Blue Devils match that 7-0 start from ‘94); 4. N.C. State (maybe? Sure.); 5-9. Some combination, in any order, of UNC, Wake Forest, ECU, Coastal Carolina and App State, which has a lot more important things going on than football. 10. Charlotte (but the 49ers did get a nice win at historic Rice Stadium on Saturday).

FINAL THOUGHTS, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

▪ I think it’s becoming something of a worst-case scenario for UNC and Mack Brown. It’s like Florida State and Bobby Bowden all over again, except without the national championships. The important, well-monied boosters at UNC love Brown. It’s why they brought him back. But it has now become a fair question of how ugly this gets.

▪ I think to the question posed in the opening, about reasonable expectations: for Duke, State and UNC, it’s probably to occasionally compete for a conference championship and win eight or nine games. In other words, what N.C. State has done for a while under Doeren — and what UNC has mostly done under Brown. Breaking through to a higher level does not seem feasible.

▪ I think you have to appreciate the Charlotte 49ers rolling into Rice and walking out with a 21-20 victory. Some trivia: Rice Stadium is where JFK in 1962 delivered one of his most important and memorable speeches, about how the United States would one day land on the moon. Can 49ers coach Biff Poggi take his program to the moon, in a metaphorical sense? Time will tell.

▪ I think football will be the least of App State’s concerns for a while, and rightfully so. We’ve not yet really started to get a sense of the devastation in Western North Carolina after the flooding from Helene. A lot of mountain cities, towns and communities will need a lot of help. The early images and reports of the destruction are heartbreaking.