Seismic changes have shaken the college sports landscape to its core over the past four years, and as of this moment, the ACC has been largely insulated from the immediate impacts of many of those changes.

The league is not headed for imminent collapse like the Pac-12 was at this time a year ago. It hasn’t onboarded athletic departments in droves like the Big 12, either. And its status as a “power conference” hasn’t been dissolved yet. But the unpredictable permutations coming to college sports won't leave the ACC alone for much longer.

The league will mark the start of football season this week at the annual ACC Kickoff event, where the existential dread shared by its member institutions will be an awkward but central topic of conversation from July 22-25.

One of the defining images of the 2023 college football season came during the College Football Playoff selection show. Following the revelation of the four-team field, ESPN cameras cut to the Florida State football facilities in Tallahassee, Fla.

Head coach Mike Norvell, front and center, didn’t move when the players around him threw their heads back in anger, screamed in anguish and wrestled with the reality of their new No. 5 ranking — the first team left out of the bracket.

“It’s unfathomable that Florida State, an undefeated Power Five conference champion, was left out of the College Football Playoff,” ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said. "Their exclusion calls into question the selection process and whether the Committee's own guidelines were followed, including the significant importance of being an undefeated Power Five conference champion.”

Phillips’ emphasis on “undefeated Power Five conference champion” is notable. Historically, fitting that description has yielded a guaranteed playoff spot. In the 10 years the four-team playoff was played, 15 teams have gone undefeated and won a Power Five conference championship, and only one has ever been excluded — 2023 Florida State.

It wasn’t long ago that Florida State and Clemson were trading positions in the College Football Playoff and winning national championships while North Carolina, Louisville, Virginia Tech and others offered compelling challenges on a weekly basis. Now, conventional wisdom states the ACC is in decline, and the decision by the selection committee to include Alabama — a one-loss SEC champion over the Seminoles — only fuels that notion.

The new edition of the playoff is three times as big, and many fear those extra spots will be reserved for members of the “Power Two” — the SEC and Big Ten. The ACC was powerless to do anything when the Seminoles were left out, and that fact was referenced prominently when the school made its next move.

Any sympathy the league offices and commissioner Phillips held for the spurned Seminoles likely ran out sometime in the middle of December. Nineteen days after the College Football Playoff snubbed its football team, Florida State University announced it would sue the ACC in an effort to release the school from the ACC’s grant of rights agreement.

The grant of rights binds Florida State athletics to the ACC and, by extension, the league’s media partners by way of what right now would be more than half a billion dollars in exit fees, should they decide to leave the conference.

Florida State argued in its initial legal complaint and has continued to assert in court that the ACC is failing to uphold its end of the bargain. The revenue gap between the ACC and its competitors in the Big Ten and SEC is widening, and with 13 years left on the ACC’s grant of rights agreement, Florida State and now Clemson, which has also sued its home conference, are stress-testing the grant of rights in court.

While the ACC battles to make itself stronger and rebuild a damaged reputation by virtue of what it puts on the field, two of its biggest football brands threaten to leave the league in the dust. The fact the ACC preemptively countersued Florida State before the schools filed their own lawsuits only adds to the tension.

Clemson and Florida State now represent the two biggest threats to a stable ACC. This creates renewed realignment anxieties for schools like Pitt, which isn’t certain to secure a place in the new Power Two and faces a foggy path forward in college athletics’ uncertain new order.

These legal battles have hit a stalemate, but the infighting will underscore an awkward event meant to celebrate the league’s football teams.

The Big Ten added USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon in the latest round of realignment. The Big 12 brought in Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah a year after welcoming UCF, BYU, Cincinnati and Houston. Texas and Oklahoma will make their SEC debuts this fall.

The ACC’s counterpunch was to add Stanford and Cal from the Pac-12 and SMU from the American Athletic Conference. Those moves were not nearly as flashy.

Like the Big 12 and Big Ten, the ACC will now be a bicoastal conference, but that likely won’t be enough to close a revenue gap with the Power Two that is approaching $200 million and growing.

SMU is doing all it can to prepare for the leap back into a power league. Their small but wealthy alumni base has been willing to pony up $159 million over the past year in donations for expansions to the football stadium and offset revenue forfeitures their invitation to the ACC was predicated on.

From a pure football standpoint, the Mustangs are in the best position of any of the newcomers to compete right now. Meanwhile, Cal has tread water around bowl eligibility for the past decade, and Stanford hit a hard reset after David Shaw’s tenure as head coach turned sour. These are wealthy academic institutions with strong profiles in sports beyond football, but that only goes so far in this landscape.

The ACC needs these three schools to contribute to its football prowess now.

Between talk of lawsuits and television deals, there will be some football discussion sprinkled into the ACC Kickoff, and this season looks ready to provide a compelling race to the conference championship game.

Clemson and Florida State are all but certain to be picked by the media to meet in the ACC title game. But the Tigers have looked like shells of the elite teams of the 2010s in recent years, and the Seminoles’ historic 2023 team lost 10 players to the NFL draft. It’s not a lock.

Louisville and NC State are reloaded and serious challengers to the leaders after finishing 2023 ranked. Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech will count on their wealth of returning talent to emerge from recent hibernation. Miami’s fate lies in the hands of a pair of dark horse Heisman Trophy candidates — quarterback Cam Ward, a transfer from Washington State, and running back Damien Martinez, a transfer from Oregon State. And don’t forget about SMU, which won 11 games in 2023 and is among the most experienced teams in this league.

In a 12-team playoff world, it’s conceivable the ACC could own up to a quarter of the field. The league has considerably more depth this year, and the stakes of the new postseason will mean more meaningful games deep into the fall.