But the way polling works for playoffs and getting any shot at the Big post season games is to move enough by mid-season to be able to be ranked top 4, or 8-10, by the end of CCGs. If after 6-0 you are ranked just 15, you likely cannot get high enough to have any shot to be top 4.
At some point, a program simply must stand uo and be a man, which features accepting high rankings and living up to them, or else it is always just a new waste of time.
The ACC has always suffered from leadership that sets the path off football to be Maybe 1 teams per year that is allowed to be really good nd if lucky could finish Top 5, while the same leaders have always wanted endless striving to have as many top 10 and top 20 basketball teams as possible. Literally, that goes back to ACC Year 1. In 1953, the first ACC year, Maryland won the National Championship in football, and the ACC office largely ignored it ever after. At the same time, the same people were endlessly trumpeting their basketball tournament and the amazing depth of basketball power the league had.
That signaled to the entire college sports world how it could, should, treat ACC sports: not serious about football and deadly serious all year long about basketball.
UNC and ACC officials never did anything to alter that until forced, and then every move was made too late and made from a faulty line of thinking (i. e. that being in the northeast was a big help rather than a hindrance to CFB; that mixing what they knew about college basketball with what they knew about the NFL was the way to understand how to make ACC football powerrful enough in all things to save ACC basketball, etc).
So what you note is applicable not just to UNC football but to the entire league except for Clemson, which still could not win a National Championship until 1981, and FSU, which had been a girls college until right before the ACC was founded.
And the league already may be Dead Man Walking because of those things.