CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The ACC released its revised tiebreaker rules at the start of the league’s media days Wednesday, aiming to avoid the scenario that sent a five-loss team to the football championship game last year and nearly cost the conference a place in the College Football Playoff.
Using what commissioner Jim Phillips called a “thoughtful, data-driven” review that included more than 10,000 simulated season outcomes, the league came up with lengthy tiebreaking procedures that navigate an expanded schedule where some teams play eight and some nine conference contests.
It has three primary objectives: making sure head-to-head results still matter most, not penalizing or rewarding teams based on the number of league games played and, if it gets far enough down the list, emphasizing a team’s overall body of work to ensure the best two teams are chosen for the ACC championship game.
“We’re confident this approach is fair, transparent, data-informed and assures our game features the two most deserving teams,” Phillips said.
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Call it the “Duke Rule” after the five-loss Blue Devils emerged from a five-way tie for second place to qualify for last year’s title game, despite having five total losses on their ledger. They made it after the conference applied its fifth tiebreaker — aggregate conference record of the tied teams’ opponents — which separated them from fellow 6-2 league mates SMU, Miami, Pitt and Georgia Tech.
Duke’s subsequent 27-20 overtime victory over Virginia in Charlotte nearly knocked the ACC out of the College Football Playoff altogether. Only the selection committee’s last-minute re-evaluation of Miami and Notre Dame, bumping the Canes over the Irish for the final at-large spot primarily because of a head-to-head victory in the season opener, saved the ACC’s behind. Tenth-seeded Miami ended up making a run to the national title game before losing to Indiana.
The CFP has changed its automatic qualifier process this year, guaranteeing access to the champions of every power conference team — last year, it was the five highest-ranked conference champions, which got Tulane and JMU into the field — so the ACC won’t be left out in any scenario, but it still wants to put its best teams forward in the title game.
The new policy, which is no less complicated, goes into place during a transition year for the league, which moved to nine conference games for most teams. Previously scheduled non-conference games mean Boston College, Clemson, Florida State, Georgia Tech and North Carolina will only play eight league games this year.
That in itself creates a conundrum in even deciding the teams at the top. The league will not punish or reward programs based on the number of conference games they played.
That means a team with an 8-1 record will be considered tied with a team that went 8-0, since both have eight wins. Conversely, a team that is 9-0 will be considered tied with a team that is 8-0, since both teams have zero losses.
If two teams are tied, head-to-head is considered first before the league goes to the higher spot in the Team Success rankings provided by SportSource Analytics. That’s a holistic metric that the College Football Playoff uses in its automatic qualifier deliberations and takes into account a team’s entire résumé, including non-conference games.
“It will come down to body of work,” Phillips said. “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.”
If, by chance, there’s a tie in those rankings, the participants will be chosen “by a draw as administered by the Commissioner or Commissioner’s designee.” The odds of it getting that far seem low.
If three or more teams are tied initially, there are more steps to the tiebreaker. If they all are common opponents — an increasingly less-likely scenario given the size of the conference — then it’s the same process: best record among the tied teams followed by highest Team Success Ranking by SportSource Analytics.
If a three-way tie or greater exists and the teams are not common opponents, the tiebreaker is as follows:
• The team that defeated each of the other tied teams is placed in the championship game and removed from the tie. The team that lost to the other tied teams is removed from the process. If necessary, the tiebreaker will restart.
• If it gets this far, the squad with the best Team Success ranking is placed in the title game and the tiebreaker is restarted.
Got it? Good. It could all be irrelevant in a year if the College Football Playoff expands and they do away with conference championship games.
“We’ll continue to watch how this thing goes,” Phillips said. “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.”
Phillips quick hits
• Phillips said the ACC is projected to produce more than $900 million in gross revenue in 2025-26, the league’s seventh consecutive record year. League revenue has doubled since 2019 and grown by more than 56 percent in the last five years.• The commissioner reiterated his preference for expansion to 24 teams in the College Football Playoff, contingent on how much television value those added games provide.
“I have been vocal about the idea that if you have a championship, and you have teams that truly could win a championship, and they’re not invited, which we experienced a few years ago, and others have experienced the last couple years, you don’t have the right format,” he said.
• The ACC championship game on Dec. 5 at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte will start at noon rather than its typical night slot. Phillips welcomes the change for a couple of reasons.
“The weather is dicey. It just is,” he said. “It can be 70 or it could be 38 degrees. To be able to play at noon, unencumbered by any other Power Four games, I’m interested to see what happens there.”
• In the wake of Dabo Swinney’s allegations that Ole Miss tampered with linebacker Luke Ferrelli, Phillips strongly urged the need for greater enforcement and consequences surrounding the practice.
“As we modernize college sports, we have to make sure that we are supporting and imploring the CSC and the NCAA enforcement group to do their job,” Phillips said. “What’s sad about what I see with some of the tampering that’s going on is there’s a failure to have restraint in college sports like I’ve never seen before.
“Tampering, expenditures, how we don’t maybe work together collaboratively as much as we should. That has to change. It just has to.”
• The NCAA recently passed a “5-for-5” rule, removing redshirting as an option and giving all players five years to play five consecutive seasons starting when they enroll or by their 19th birthday, whichever comes first.
Phillips is for what he called this “common sense” reform, wanting to avoid situations where players who lose an appeal for extra eligibility go to a local courthouse to try to find a friendly judge who will be on their side.
“I don’t blame a student-athlete for wanting to get another year of eligibility no matter what the circumstance is,” Phillips said. “But as it’s done in our conference, sometimes you have to go against that.”
When UVa quarterback Chandler Morris sought a legal injunction for another year, the typically student-athlete-friendly Phillips submitted an affidavit asking the court to uphold eligibility rules and deny another season of competition.
“I don’t like that. I don’t like going against student-athletes,” he said. “But I did in the springtime with one of our student-athletes because I just didn't feel like another year of eligibility was appropriate.”
• Phillips strongly supports the Save College Sports Act moving through Congress, though it faces substantial hurdles, particularly in an election year, calling it “a chance to stabilize the future of college athletics.”
He emphasized that it’s a critical time for action.
“I still remain confident that we can get something done, because if we don’t, it’s all on us,” Phillips said. “That’s our fault. It just is, because we’re supposed to be the stewards of this thing called college sports.
“Whatever that looks like, however long we’re in these roles, you want it to look better when you leave than when you first started. You have a responsibility to 550,000 young men and women that access higher education. It’s made affordable by coming through college sports.”
Asked about the idea of breaking away from the current NCAA model and moving in a direction of self-governance, Phillips quipped: “Self-governance to me means no governance.”