BroBible
The SEC is widely considered college football’s premier conference, but the ACC has also boasted plenty of talent over the decades. Some legendary football players have honed their skills on the teams that comprise it, and there are some that stand out when it comes to the most talented guys to play at each school.
The ACC has been home to some incredibly talented football players who dominated at the college level and managed to pick up where they left off in the NFL.
For the purpose of this list, I’m taking their entire career into consideration as opposed to focusing solely on their time at their alma mater, and if you object to any of the choices I made, you should know I also had trouble deciding between some very worthy candidates.
There are a handful of notable quarterbacks who have come through Chestnut Hill, but none of them have had the kind of impact Matt Ryan did in The Heights before making his way to the NFL.
The Eagles are still chasing the high of a college career where Ryan breathed new life into a program that had largely been mired in mediocrity since Doug Flutie became the first (and still only) BC player to win the Heisman. The man known as “Matty Ice” was selected by the Falcons with the third overall pick, and he spent the majority of a 15-year NFL career in Atlanta while earning four Pro Bowl nods along with MVP honors in 2016.
Honorable Mentions: Matt Ryan, Luke Kuechly, Bill Romanowski
Clemson is to ACC football what Duke is to basketball: a school that’s produced a ton of incredibly talented college players who struggled to dominate like they had after making the leap to the pros.
With that said, there are some notable exceptions, and none of them stick out more than Brian Dawkins. He was a standout safety with the Tigers who was picked by the Eagles in the second round of the NFL Draft in 1996 and spent the bulk of his 16-year career in Philadelphia en route to retiring as a nine-time Pro Bowler.
Honorable Mentions: DeAndre Hopkins, William Perry
Unlike the aforementioned basketball program, Duke has historically struggled to attract top-tier talent, and there aren’t exactly a ton of candidates to pick from when it comes to the best football players to suit up for the Blue Devils.
That does make it much easier to give the nod to Sonny Jurgensen, the North Carolina native who stayed close to home in college in the 1950s before embarking on an 18-year journey in the NFL, where he was named to the Pro Bowl five times as a quarterback for the Eagles and the team that’s now known as the Commanders.
Honorable Mentions: Mike Curtis, George McAfee
