The good, the bad and the ugly

The good: Wake Forest. Things will most likely change when the Deacons get into their ACC schedule, but then again ...
Give Wake and Coach Jim Grobe some credit. After beating Liberty Saturday, combined with Virginia Tech's loss to Georgia Tech, Wake is the ACC's only unbeaten team (which looks even more impressive after Ole Miss, which Wake whipped last week, gave Georgia a great game before falling short Saturday night). Grobe has preached that his practice of redshirting players would mean a more mature, and therefore a better, football team. So far it's paying off in Winston Salem.
A couple of other good items from Saturday: If Wake Forest isn't, Georgia Tech is the surprise of the conference so far. Nice job going into Blacksburg and hammering the Hokies.
And Clemson, while routing Louisiana Tech, had three running backs go over 100 yards.

The bad: I'm not sure if this should have been good for Virginia or just plain bad for Duke. But since UVa. still has that loss to Western Michigan on its record, let's give Duke the bad. The Devils were at home against a bad UVa. team. It was a chance for Duke to finally win a game, a conference game even, and it got steamrolled. We all knew Duke was bad, just not this bad.

The ugly: We knew nothing about Virginia Tech before Saturday. The Hokies were unbeaten, but had played no team of significance. When VT finally did play a quality opponent, it wasn't pretty. The defense was the strength of the team, supposedly, but that unit fell flat Saturday. The special teams, the strength every season, also stunk it up. And the offensive line ... it could be this week's ugly all by itself. Virginia Tech went from being one of the favorites in the conference to a team in trouble with games at Boston College and at home against Clemson coming up in October.

- Patrick Hite