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CLEMSON | Ole Miss is a middle-of-the-road job in the SEC.

Try to imagine, say, Pittsburgh hiring a new football coach and the first thing he hears from a fan after he steps off the plane is: "Get yourself a burner phone."

Imagine, say, Syracuse giving zero you-know-whats and going out and hiring fast-and-loose Lane Kiffin just a couple years after another fast-and-loose coach made the program a national embarrassment.

And so encapsulates the ACC's most fundamental obstacle as it tries its hardest to make football supremely important.

Revenues made, and revenues available, strongly suggest that football is king. It was enough for the ACC to go away from its basketball roots as it tried to reconfigure its DNA to make football the dominant strain.

But there's only so much you can do. You can't snap your fingers and manufacture all-consuming desire for football at schools that have traditionally viewed it as a more casual pursuit.

Analyzing the recruiting in the two conferences over recent years is instructive as we're trying to understand what it's going to take for the ACC to gain more respectability in the future.

Before we go any further, two points need to be understood: