There is no Michigan or Ohio State in the ACC.

And Virginia Tech fired James Franklin’s former coordinator in favor of hiring Franklin himself.

There won’t be many, if any, better marriages in an already wild coaching carousel.

Virginia Tech hired a coach whose team was in the national semifinals less than a year ago.

Franklin can see what anyone else can see: The ACC is ripe for the taking, and Virginia Tech’s path to the College Football Playoff is far clearer than at Arkansas, which had also reportedly courted Franklin in the past month.

Had Franklin signed up to be the head Hog, he’d more frequently encounter the exact problem that was his biggest issue at Penn State: competing against the sport’s biggest brands with an inferior roster.

At Virginia Tech, there is no behemoth looming. The gap between the top of the league and its second class is tiny.

Virginia Tech hired a proven winner with credentials in a different stratosphere than any coach it’s hired in more than a century of football in Blacksburg.

Franklin gets a job at a place that cares deeply about the sport and appears prepared to compete financially at a level necessary to be an ACC contender. There is no reason why Virginia Tech can’t climb that mountain in a hurry.

Dabo Swinney didn’t lose four games in a season from 2011-2022. He’s done it every year since and already has five losses this year. It seems clear his best days — and Clemson’s days as a perennial national title contender — are over.

Florida State? The Seminoles are desperately hoping Mike Norvell can salvage a seven-win season and save them more than $50 million in a buyout they’re praying they don’t have to pay.

Miami? The Hurricanes have the league’s best roster, but Franklin has already won as many ACC titles as The U.

As it stands, the ACC standings are a jumbled mix led by one-loss teams Virginia, Pitt, Georgia Tech and SMU.

Can anyone give a good reason why Virginia Tech can’t compete with that group for titles? And in the portal era, where it’s never been easier to rebuild and flip rosters, why can’t it do so relatively quickly?

Franklin coached the Big Ten’s third-best program to at least 10 wins six times in a 10-year span. He did it by beating teams that had inferior rosters to his at Penn State.

His only true knock before a dramatic, sudden nose-dive this season was being unable to beat teams with dramatically better talent than his own. This season, he finally had an elite roster. His team stumbled. Penn State had seen enough.

Virginia Tech would love to get sick of winning 10 games. It’s accomplished that feat just once since 2012. And it just hired a coach who seems to have a keen sense of the new world of college football.

He mobilized Penn State’s financial backers to make sure talents like Kaytron Allen, Nick Singleton, Dani Dennis-Sutton and Drew Allar returned to Penn State rather than begin their NFL careers.

There’s no hiding from 2025. It was a disaster. But it also looked a lot more like an anomaly than the beginning of a trend. Penn State is desperate to reach the top of the sport. This season made it abundantly clear to the Nittany Lion faithful that Franklin wasn’t going to take them there.

It doesn’t necessarily mean they were right. He just ran out of time to prove it.

He’ll get a second chance at a program that’s played for a national title more recently (1999) than the program that just fired him.

He’s not being hired away from a blue blood by a megadeal like Brian Kelly at LSU or Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M, both seemingly home run hires who quickly struck out once the pitches were live.

He’s only 53. He just got fired. Nothing motivates a coach more than being told he’s not good enough.

Franklin understands the modern game, but it would behoove him not to dwell on the tertiary things. The constant complaining wore thin in Happy Valley. There will be plenty to complain about in Blacksburg.

But none of it is big enough to keep him from taking the program to heights it hasn’t enjoyed in decades.

Franklin rarely experienced life coaching with the best roster in a conference. Or at least one on par with the league’s best. He can do it at Virginia Tech.

And Virginia Tech, in a crowded, competitive coaching carousel, couldn’t have asked for a better option.