Remember the fallout from when our UVA Football team couldn’t take care of a 7-5 Duke team in Charlotte in December? The ACC is trying to fix things so that a five-loss team won’t put us in the situation we found ourselves in there.
If you recall, we had five teams tied for second in the regular season with 6-2 conference records.
Miami was 10-2 overall at the end of the regular season; Georgia Tech was 9-3, and Pitt and SMU were both 8-4.
But Duke, at 7-5, got the second spot behind 7-1 Virginia because the tiebreaker formula in place back then was dumb.
Going forward, in cases like the one we had last year, “the team with the strongest overall body of work will earn the opportunity to compete for the ACC Championship and the conference’s automatic qualifier to the College Football Playoff.”
Read between the lines as to who that will benefit.
We do have the weird qualifier for the 2026 season because the ACC decided to allow five schools – Boston College, Clemson, Florida State, Georgia Tech and North Carolina – to get away with only having to play eight conference games in 2026, with the other 12 playing nine.
That’s going to create a situation where somebody either sneaks or is screwed because of the lack of common sense of the folks running things, which will continue to be an issue into the future, but not as much of one.
Beginning in 2027, because the ACC has an odd number of schools, at 17, one school will have to play an eight-game conference schedule, on a rotating basis, with everybody else playing nine.
Maybe this “rotating basis” should rotate back-and-forth between Boston College and Syracuse, just to simplify things.
In any case.
Gotta like the “strongest overall body of work” language in the tiebreaker.
Might as well just spell it out – “this will serve to the benefit of Clemson, Florida State and Miami.”
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Chris Graham
