The ACC has overhauled the way it will break ties for its conference championship game, a move shaped directly by last season’s mess of a five-way logjam at 6-2.
Head-to-head results will still sit at the top of the pecking order, but the league’s third tiebreaker now will be the team that ranks highest in the Team Success Ranking by Sport Source Analytics, one of the numbers the College Football Playoff committee already uses.
That change matters because the ACC had to go all the way to its seventh tiebreaker last year to sort out a five-team tie for second place. Miami, Virginia and Duke emerged from that tangle, with Miami left out of the title game. The Hurricanes later earned the final at-large spot in the CFP and went on to the national championship game.
Miami finished No. 12 in the penultimate CFP rankings and then climbed to No. 10 after sitting idle on championship week, moving ahead of Notre Dame. The Hurricanes had trailed the Irish in every CFP poll except the last one, even after beating Notre Dame 27-24 in Miami in Week 1.
Duke, meanwhile, won the ACC title but still missed the playoff field. The Blue Devils finished behind Sun Belt champion James Madison in the final CFP poll.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said the new setup also includes a second principle: no team will be “rewarded or penalized” for the number of conference games it plays. That’s a real issue this season, when the ACC is rolling out a scheduling model that has 12 of its 17 teams playing nine conference games and the other five playing eight because of already-scheduled nonconference games against power conference opponents.
Starting in 2027, every ACC team except one will play nine conference games. The lone team playing eight will rotate each year.
Phillips said in December that the league would revisit its tiebreakers, and over the seven months since then, ACC leadership has been weighing different options. One possibility that would have improved the league’s chances of getting its champion into the playoff was using the final CFP rankings as a tiebreaker. But those rankings don’t come out until Tuesday of championship week, which would leave the ACC without its title-game matchup until then.
The playoff format gives five automatic spots to the five highest-ranked conference champions. Miami’s absence from the ACC title game last year helped open the door for two Group of 6 champions to make the 12-team field for the first time: James Madison and American champion Tulane.
Both lost in the first round on the road. James Madison fell at Oregon 51-34 after trailing 34-6 at halftime, and Tulane was beaten 41-10 at Ole Miss.
Miami, after missing the ACC title game, beat Texas A&M in College Station in the first round and then knocked off Ole Miss 31-27 two rounds later to reach the championship game, where it lost 27-21 to Indiana.
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