The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) ended up with five football teams tied for second place last year, which made for an intriguing finish with an unpredictable championship game.
The ACC saw a 7–5 Duke team stun regular season champion Virginia and disrupt the College Football Playoff committee. While the committee ended up rightly choosing Miami, another ACC team stuck in the second-place jumble, the logjam garnered plenty of attention and controversy. The ACC has attempted to solve the problem this year with a new tiebreaker rule, which commissioner Jim Phillips discussed Wednesday in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“You have to do everything you can to position your championship game with those two best teams,” Phillips told reporters. “Head-to-head matters. That’s always most important. Then we will look at the grouping and how teams fared. It will come down to body of work. I’m looking forward to that.”
The ACC will use head-to-head competition as the main tiebreaker, and the 17 teams are playing nine conference games this year. Five teams can’t play nine conference games because of prior nonconference commitments.
To separate any ties, the ACC has SportsSource Analytics’ Team Success Ranking break down teams by overall performance for the season. If the ranking can’t resolve a tie, the commissioner will do a random draw.
If there are three or more teams tied and they all played one another, the team with the best head-to-head results gets the tiebreaker. Otherwise, it goes to the team success ranking and the commissioner’s draw.
If three or more teams tie and they didn’t all play one another, a possibility in a 17-team league, the team that defeated the other tied teams advances. If no team swept, the outcome depends on the team success ranking or draw if necessary.
It’s imperative as the Power Four conference owns an automatic bid for the CFP, and it would have been Duke last year. Phillips explained how widely championship matchups can vary among the 17 teams, based on consultative work using 10,000 simulated seasons.
“It warranted that kind of time and commitment, so that we can position ourselves to put those two best ACC teams forward,” Phillips explained. “We'll continue to watch how this thing goes. But I feel incredibly strong that we have gotten to the right place with unanimity from our membership on what this new tie-breaking policy states.”
Besides Miami, the ACC hasn’t enjoyed much success in the CFP. Clemson and Southern Methodist University, the two 2024 ACC championship game entrants, both got bounced quickly from the first 12-team playoff.
In 2025, Virginia went 7–1 and looked poised for a CFP debut before Duke’s upset, which led to the CFP committee choosing 12–1 Sun Belt champion James Madison instead. Miami got into the CFP on its own merits and a season-opening upset of Notre Dame.
In the ACC second-place jumble, the five teams that finished in the 6–2 deadlock were Duke (9–5), Miami (13–3), Pittsburgh (8–5), SMU (9–4) and Georgia Tech (9–4). Duke had the highest ACC opponent winning percentage out of those teams.
Miami looks like a top-10 team and a national title contender again. Clemson, Louisville, SMU, Virginia Tech, and Florida State could make the top-25 this season and possibly push for a CFP spot. Virginia, Georgia Tech and Duke also can’t be ignored, especially after last season.
North Carolina State might be a dark horse to make a run, and the rest of the conference could be trouble on a week-to-week basis. Wake Forest, California, and North Carolina have the potential to make some noise, and Syracuse, Boston College, and Stanford can’t be overlooked.
Regardless of how the ACC shakes out, the league won’t have a random championship game entrant with a mediocre record in Charlotte this time around.
