GREENSBORO, Ga. -- The ACC's final season as a nine-team football league was 2003. Virginia Tech and Miami joined the conference in 2004, and Boston College followed in '05, the first season in which the ACC staged a championship game.

Expansion was supposed to produce a powerful football league, but that hasn't happened. The ACC has yet to send an at-large team to the Bowl Championship Series. Worse, the ACC's champion has dropped eight straight BCS games, a streak extended by Virginia Tech's loss to Kansas in the Orange Bowl in January.

"Now, there's no question that [the ACC has] to do better in the BCS," Hokies coach Frank Beamer told reporters yesterday at the league's preseason media event. "We let the Atlantic Coast Conference down last year. We didn't play the way we needed to play in that type of ballgame, representing this conference."

Tech is not the only ACC team to struggle in the postseason. The conference's bowl record over the past four seasons -- 14-16 -- ranks fifth among the six BCS leagues. Only the Big Ten (11-17) has a lower winning percentage. The ACC continues to churn out first-round NFL draft picks at an impressive rate, but the league hasn't been so successful on the field.

"The main thing that would help us is beating other schools," Florida State coach Bobby Bowden said yesterday. "We need to beat schools in the SEC and schools in the Big Ten and schools in other conferences. That way we can claim we're as good as any of them."

Bowden is one of five ACC coaches left from the pre-expansion era, along with his son Tommy Bowden at Clemson, Al Groh at Virginia, Ralph Friedgen at Maryland and Jim Grobe at Wake Forest.

"One thing I didn't think would happen that has happened is the parity," Friedgen said. "I think it's a lot tougher league now than what it was, because everybody can beat everybody else, and that makes it tough week in and week out. It reminds me a lot of the NFL, to be honest with you."

In 2007, for example, Virginia Tech was the only ACC team that didn't lose at least two conference games during the regular season. Such parity is not a bad thing, Groh might argue.

"Within the conference," Groh said, expansion "has created some tremendously competitive games, and that's what the ACC fans who are sitting in the stadiums get to see every week.

"There's a lot of different ways to measure conferences. One of the ways to measure it is the quality of the competition within the league. If one team wins every week and wins most of the games by 35 points and then wins the national championship, is that a good league?"

The dramatic decline of Miami and Florida State in recent years has, of course, marred the ACC's national reputation. When the ACC voted to expand, conventional wisdom held that the Hurricanes would represent the Coastal Division and the Seminoles the Atlantic in the ACC championship game most years.

"Both of them were at the top of the pile," Tommy Bowden said. "Virginia Tech was close. Boston College had a nice run going, and I think everybody anticipated, 'Gosh, this was going to be a dominant conference.'"

That's yet to occur, but Bobby Bowden believes the quality of play in the ACC has improved, one reason his program has dropped off.

"Everybody's gotten better," the elder Bowden said. "We ain't as bad as you think . . . Our conference is not bad. Our conference is pretty darn good. I don't know if the SEC is the toughest conference from top to bottom. It might be. But we're not very far behind."

Groh, for one, said he's pleased by what expansion has wrought in the ACC.

"The race to win the division and the chance at the conference championship, which sustains teams throughout the course of the season, has been very significant," Groh said. "From our perspective, it's been all good."