In every major sport – college football included – scoring more points is more exciting to the casual fan. Football fans want to see high-scoring offenses with elite quarterbacks and jaw-dropping catches, baseball fans love titanic home runs, basketball fans want to see 30-point-per-game scorers, and so on.
But the age-old saying, defense wins championships, exists for a reason: because it’s true.
Max Olson of ESPN calculated the defensive stop rate for every FBS team after Week 8 of the college football season. The defensive stop rate is simple, it is the percentage of a defense’s drives that end in either a punt, turnover, or turnover on downs.
While it may be simple, it is an effective way to evaluate a team’s defense and proves that the best teams in the sport are the ones that get stops and get their offense back onto the field.
The Texas Longhorns, Ohio State Buckeyes, and Tennessee Volunteers are the three college football teams with a stop rate of over 81% on the season and are all among the best teams in the country. Other top ten teams include Notre Dame, Army, Iowa State, and Indiana.
The ACC isn’t made up of many dominant defensive teams, with only five programs ranking inside the top 50 after Week 8, and five teams outside the top 100.
Below is a look at where each ACC team ranks in terms of stop rate ahead of Week 9:
Stop Rate for ACC Teams
| Overall | ACC Rank | Team | Stop Rate | Pts/Drive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | 1 | Duke Blue Devils | 74.7% | 1.27 |
| 16 | 2 | Cal Golden Bears | 72.9% | 1.59 |
| 25 | 3 | SMU Mustangs | 70.3% | 1.73 |
| 26 | 4 | Virginia Tech Hokies | 70.2% | 1.82 |
| 27 | 5 | Clemson Tigers | 69.8% | 1.83 |
| 54 | 6 | Pitt Panthers | 64.9% | 1.98 |
| 63 | 7 | Miami Hurricanes | 63.6% | 1.99 |
| 84 | 8 | Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets | 58.7% | 2.18 |
| 86 | 9 | Florida State Seminoles | 58.7% | 2.09 |
| 90 | 10 | Virginia Cavaliers | 57.4% | 2.29 |
| 92 | 11 | Louisville Cardinals | 57.1% | 2.44 |
| 95 | 12 | Boston College Eagles | 56.9% | 2.12 |
| 100 | 13 | North Carolina Tar Heels | 56.2% | 2.44 |
| 110 | 14 | Syracuse Orange | 53.1% | 2.35 |
| 112 | 15 | NC State Wolfpack | 52.5% | 2.49 |
| 119 | 16 | Stanford Cardinal | 49.3% | 2.96 |
| 123 | 17 | Wake Forest Demon Deacons | 47.1% | 2.93 |