Time to scrap the "natural rival"

In 2005, ACC football went to a two division format. Each team was given a "natural rival"--a team that they would play from the opposing division every year, alternating home and away sites. Now its been four full seasons, giving us a good opportunity to see how this scheduling system has been working out with each team having played 2 away and 2 home games against their designated rival. Just to quickly get an idea of how fair this system has been, I collected the winning percentages for each team (admittedly a poor proxy for team strength but useful for a quick look) in the conference for the past four years and ranked the teams according to the success of their rival:



What immediately jumps out is the remarkable parity in the relative success of almost every team's rival. Just going up and down the list, you can see that most rival teams are usually adjacent, and sport win percentages that match-up closely. I think this has the tendency to blunt any advantage of a team over another. In other words, since Clemson is no more likely to beat their rival then say, Maryland is to beat Virginia, no one is really at an advantage.

Unfortunately, there is one exception: Wake Forest. WF has a ridiculous competitive advantage right now over the other teams in the Atlantic Division. Really, though, the ACC is probably lucky that only one team is at an advantage right now relative to the others. In a system like this, its likely the conference ultimately ends up in a situation where several teams are benefiting from a weak rival, putting the other competing teams at a disadvantage. The ACC should give some serious thought to scrapping the "natural rival" and rotating through three teams in a given season instead of just two. This wouldn't eliminate scheduling disadvantages from year-to-year (inevitable with a unbalanced schedule), but strength of schedule should at least more or less even out over time.

If any team starts crying over losing their precious rivalry, its probably time to start talking division realignment. Something has to be done, the other teams in the Atlantic Division can't afford to keep spotting Wake Forest a game every year.