Right around 2011 was probably the year. ACC football champion Clemson lost its bowl game to West Virginia by 37 points, finishing 10-4 and No. 22, with no other ACC team ranked any higher.

An ACC team hadn't won a football title in the 2000s. Miami's arrival was supposed to fortify the conference, but the Canes had been scandal- and/or coach-plagued for years. Florida State had fallen off as Bobby Bowden aged. Virginia Tech filled in as the conference heavyweight but had gone 1-4 in BCS bowls as an ACC member.

The ACC was often considered the weakest of the Power 5, with all those Basketball Conference jokes from the '80s still holding up just fine. (Basketball had won five national titles since 2000.) Meanwhile, its neighbor was in the middle of a seven-year national title streak...in football. Definitely not in basketball, despite the efforts of Florida and Kentucky.

The identities were clear. One conference gets made fun of for its weakness in one sport, and then a few months later, all the jokes bounce right back.

Now look at us.

If Florida pulls this out, the SEC will have three Elite Eight teams for the first time since Auburn, Kentucky & LSU in 1986. — David Paschall (@DavidSPaschall) March 25, 2017

The SEC has three teams in the Elite 8, all from schools that play in football's SEC East, which might've been the worst Power 5 division. And either Florida or South Carolina will take one Final Four spot. In football, the SEC finished with just one team, Bama, in the AP's top 12, which isn't far off from some of the ACC's most lopsided years.

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Clemson sits on the football throne, four years after FSU ended the SEC's streak. ACC teams won the Orange Bowl, the Heisman, and the Piesman. The ACC was, by the numbers, at least tied for the title of best 2016 football league, and a tie goes to the national champ's conference. The conference also has only one member, North Carolina, in this year's Elite 8 (and the Heels were lucky to get past Arkansas) and has only won one basketball title since 2010.

Some of this is a fluke, sure. But some isn’t. The ACC's made smarter football coaching hires than the SEC has, Duke had a team that should've made the Final Four — having one SEC hoops team make a Cinderella run as the Gators and Wildcats take care of business isn't that shocking — the SEC ran into a conference-wide lack of QB experience all at once, and so on and so forth.

However, it's clear that ACC football is a long way from joke status. Clemson, FSU, Louisville, Miami, and others will be top-20 contenders in 2017.

And even if SEC basketball isn't quite as good as its tourney suggests -- only UF and UK ranked in Ken Pomeroy's top 27 this season — the tourney's the only thing talking at this exact moment.