{"id":89313,"date":"2026-07-17T16:03:50","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T20:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/?p=89313"},"modified":"2026-07-17T16:58:43","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T20:58:43","slug":"day-three-of-acc-kickoff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/2026\/07\/17\/day-three-of-acc-kickoff\/","title":{"rendered":"Day Three of ACC Kickoff"},"content":{"rendered":"

The personalities were big in Charlotte on day three of ACC Kickoff<\/a> in Charlotte on Friday. SMU brought players wearing product endorsement cowboy hats to go with their suits and jewelry. Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi is never at a loss for things to say. Wake\u2019s Jake Dickert is a new level of high energy in Winston-Salem. And while UNC\u2019s Bill Belichick might not light the room on fire, his players brought the big-time conversation.<\/p>\n

Day Three of ACC Kickoff<\/h2>\n

A Different Look<\/h3>\n

Kevin Jennings<\/a> is a rarity in college football these days. He is a starting quarterback who has spent all four years at the same school. He began his career at SMU and will finish it in Dallas this season. \u201cI think it’s remembering where I come from, honestly. At first, it wasn’t all of this coming into college. I didn’t have all the offers. SMU believed in me. Staying honest to my roots, having my teammates check me anytime I get out of place. I’m working as hard as possible. That’s the main thing, for sure, just having great people around me,\u201d he told the media Friday.<\/p>\n

He also made headlines this week when financial donors committed money to create the \u00a0Kevin Jennings Recovery Center. SMU announced the center is designed to be a space designed to provide Mustang student-athletes with premier resources to enhance performance, accelerate recovery, and support overall well-being. \u201cI’m extremely blessed to have that. It’s an opportunity for me to leave my legacy at SMU. The support staff around SMU truly means a lot. They put me in a situation, helped me out a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Money Talks<\/h3>\n

It is an inevitable topic at these events. Narduzzi talked about the flood of money impacting the game and whether a program having more money guarantees success. \u201cI think we’re going in that direction. If you have all that money you have the opportunity to buy yourself a football team & you should win the most games. Now is that always gonna be the case? I don\u2019t think so, but you\u2019re doing a bad job if you can\u2019t do it w\/all that money,\u201d he said Friday.<\/p>\n

Wake Forest head coach Jake Dickert addressed our question about how schools can compete if they are not going $20-$30 million over the revenue-sharing cap. \u201cOne of my pet peeves of our game is that there are so many excuses. So if we\u2019re not good next year, I just get to come up here next year with a free excuse, that we don\u2019t have this and that,\u201d he told us. \u201cWe\u2019re going to see who are the good coaches or who just has the best payroll?\u201d<\/p>\n

Dickert acknowledged that Wake is in the bottom tier of the ACC in terms of schools that have the kind of money to create those over-the-top payrolls. He said it requires those not-well-financially-heeled programs to be more convicted in how they develop players.<\/p>\n

The Players Doing the Talking<\/h3>\n

UNC head coach Bill Belichick was everything you expected him to be at the event. \u201cMeasured\u201d would be one way to put it. But his players were erudite with their time in the spotlight.<\/p>\n

Center Christo Kelly talked about what it was like staying at UNC to play for Belichick. \u201cObviously he knows a thing or two about winning, but just the willingness to want to do whatever it takes to win. The work ethic that he has sets the standard for the rest of this team,\u201d he told the press conference.<\/p>\n

He talked about washing away last year\u2019s poor season. \u201cThere’s no magic pill that you can take for success. Everything is done through hard work, all right? You’ve got to be able to lean into it. You’ve got to be a great teammate,\u201d he said. \u201cThe biggest thing, right, is earning the respect of your teammates. The way that you do that, like our workout on Wednesday, we ran bouts with Jordan (Shipp), ran bouts with all the skill guys. That stuff is hard. The training is hard. It’s supposed to be hard. That stuff is hard. The training is hard. It’s supposed to be hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shipp talked about the Tar Heels circling the wagons around their head coach. \u201cWe all had to rally against each other — or rally with each other because it seemed like everybody was kind of against us. Everybody wanting to see Coach Belichick fail. Nobody wanting to see him be successful in his first year of college football. Nobody wanted to see that,\u201d he said. \u201cWe learned that more and more. We seen there were articles coming out saying he wasn’t at practice during the bye week when we just got off the field, and he’s standing right next to me. Stuff like that. It just sounds dumb. That’s not true. Why are we even paying attention to that?\u201d<\/p>\n

Breaking the Tie<\/h3>\n

Earlier in the week, the ACC announced a less convoluted, but still illogical change to the tiebreak rule. It would seek to avoid what happened last season with Duke in the championship game against Virginia, and winning, thus sending Miami to the playoff. Blue Devils head coach Manny Diaz talked about that on Friday. “I heard we made the news. I heard we got a rule named after us. That’s pretty cool, right? The Duke tiebreaker rule,” he said. ”\u00a0Inherent in the narrative of changing a tiebreaker for the conference championship game is the assertion that last year’s team was undeserved of being in the championship game. You hear that word that now there will be more deserved teams in the championship game. I want to push back against that narrative,” he added. “<\/span><\/p>\n

I think it’s not just false, I think it’s insulting. What we’re in is we’re in a competition. That’s what this is. 17 teams showed up here this weekend to compete for one championship. The most simple way to do that is if we could all play each other, right, but we can’t do that. There’s too many damn teams, right?\u00a0The one thing you can do is you can add up all the wins and losses and add up all the wins and losses of the eight teams that you played against or the nine teams this year. By that metric, which is the most objective metric that you can possibly have, there’s no feelings or emotions involved in that, we were the top team to go play Virginia in that game.”<\/p>\n

The media pre-season poll<\/a> for the ACC will be released next week. Miami is certain to be picked #1. After that, it\u2019s anybody\u2019s guess.<\/p>\n

Main Image: ShotwithGrave\/Grace Sorrells<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The personalities were big in Charlotte on day three of ACC Kickoff in Charlotte on Friday. SMU brought players wearing product endorsement cowboy hats to go with their suits and jewelry. Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi is never at a loss for things to say. Wake\u2019s Jake Dickert is a new level of high energy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":89318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,2],"tags":[3851,311,101,256,590,1249],"class_list":["post-89313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-acc","category-featured","tag-cal-bears","tag-duke-blue-devils","tag-north-carolina-tar-heels","tag-pitt-panthers","tag-smu-mustangs","tag-wake-forest-demon-deacons"],"modified_by":"Tony Siracusa, CFB Managing Editor","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89313"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89320,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89313\/revisions\/89320"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}