The ACC has a new answer for the kind of mess that unfolded at the end of last season, when a five-way tie for second place left the league sorting through a tangled championship picture.
Commissioner Jim Phillips announced the updated football tiebreaker system, a change aimed at handling a 17-team conference in which not every team plays everyone else. Last December, SMU, Miami, Pittsburgh, Georgia Tech and Duke all finished 6-2 in league play. Duke, despite a 7-5 overall record and a head-to-head loss to Georgia Tech in Durham, wound up in the championship game and beat Virginia.
That outcome sparked the push for a new setup, and Phillips said the conference has now settled on one.
"The updated tiebreaking procedure is built on three guiding principles: Head-to-head results will always matter most. No team will be overly rewarded or penalized based on the number of conference games it played. When head-to-head competition cannot separate tied teams, 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."
The league also laid out how it will handle three-or-more-team ties. If the tied teams are all common opponents, the first step is the best record among the tied teams. If that doesn’t break the tie, the ACC will use the Team Success Ranking from SportSource Analytics after the regular season, and if needed, a draw administered by the commissioner or a designee.
If the tied teams are not all common opponents, the first step is to identify the team that beat each of the other tied teams and place that team into the championship game, while removing the team that lost to each of the others. If that still doesn’t settle it, the conference goes to the SportSource Analytics ranking, and then to a draw if necessary.
Phillips said the ranking system is already familiar to the league and fits the direction college football is heading.
"A team's success ranking from sports source analytics, we've used them in the past, it will be the third element of the tiebreaking system. It's what the CFP uses. I think you have to go and give an opportunity to place your two best teams.
What's changed this year is that there's an AQ awarded for The Power Four conferences. So you have to do everything you can to position your championship game with those two best teams.
So we're going to stay -- head-to-head matters. That's always most important. Then we will look at the grouping and how teams fared in the regular conference season.
It will come down to body of work. Who you play, when you play, the games you win, conference and non-conference will matter. That's a major change in college sports and certainly for the ACC.
I'm looking forward to that. I had just say this.
We talked a lot about it, used a lot of consultants, did 10,000 algorithms of different scenarios. It warranted that kind of time and commitment so that we can position ourselves to put those two best ACC teams forward.
Our schedule's not perfect coming up this year because we're going into that transition period where we're going to nine games, we have an uneven number of teams in the conference. 12 of our schools will play nine conference games, five of our schools will play eight. Everyone will play 10 Power Four games, so there's some balance there.
We'll continue to watch how this thing goes. But I feel incredibly strong that we have gotten to the right place with unanimity with our membership on what this new tiebreaking policy states."
Georgia Tech, meanwhile, has been knocking on the door of the ACC title game in each of Brent Key’s first three seasons. The Yellow Jackets are hoping to finally break through in his fourth year and finish in Charlotte with a shot at the College Football Playoff.
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