Brennan Armstrong: The third-best QB in the ACC?

Brennan Armstrong is averaging 404.5 passing yards per game, tops among Power 5 QBs. Which was only good enough to land him on the All-ACC third team.

Kenny Pickett of Pitt was the first-team QB, and Sam Hartman at Wake Forest is your second-team guy, the folks at the ACC office tell us.

None of them got a vote from me. The panel voting is comprised of 50 media members and the league’s head coaches.

No way I’m ever going to be one of those 50, even though, oddly, I get a vote for the preseason team, which I think in the future I’ll just pass on, in protest that I now realize I’ll never be one of those 50.

Anyway, back to the injustice of Armstrong being third-team. It’s almost certainly because Virginia finished 6-6, and Pitt and Wake are playing for the ACC title this weekend.

Pickett led the conference in pass efficiency (168.4; Armstrong was fourth, at 156.4, with Hartman fifth, at 155.6) and TDs (40, with Hartman third at 34, and Armstrong fourth at 31).

Armstrong, despite missing a game, had by far the most total yards (4,449; Pickett was second with 4,049, and Hartman a distant third with 3,711).

A key part of the context here is that Armstrong put these numbers up with Virginia ranking 14th, dead last, in the ACC in rushing (121.8 yards per game).

Virginia still ended up leading the ACC in total offense (514.4 yards per game). That was almost literally all Armstrong, who averaged 428.2 yards per game total offense this season.

Virginia’s defense was almost as bad as the offense was good, ranking 13th in the ACC, and 121st among the 130 teams in FBS, allowing 466.0 yards per game.

And if there’s any doubt as to Armstrong’s value, look at the Notre Dame game, a 28-3 loss. That’s the one that Armstrong missed with a rib injury. His backup, true freshman Jay Woolfolk, was 18-of-33 passing for 196 yards and two INTs, and the Virginia offense was held to a season-low 278 yards.

Point of bringing that up being: Armstrong’s numbers aren’t a plug-and-play kind of thing.

You can say the same, I think, about Pickett.

Hartman, at Wake, has himself a Jamie Newman problem in that respect.

Remember how Newman transferred out to go to Georgia after putting up big numbers as a junior?

Newman went from being a first-round NFL Draft pick to not having his name selected.

I know that I’m making too big an issue of this. It’s just a ribbon and a plaque, a line on the bio.

If I have to report on this, I also have to have some whine and cheese.

Story by Chris Graham