CHARLOTTE – Miami finished with the second-best record in the ACC last season and played Indiana in the championship game of the College Football Playoff. But because of a flawed tiebreaking procedure, the Hurricanes were denied an opportunity to play for the conference title.
And it nearly cost them, and by extension the entire ACC, a spot in the 12-team Playoff field.
It’s a situation the league has taken steps to avoid in the future by adopting a new tiebreaking procedure that puts a higher priority on head-to-head competition and increases the likelihood of conference championship being decided by its best two teams.
“Following a thoughtful data-driven review by our athletic directors, including the evaluation of more than 10,000 simulated season outcomes, we have adopted an approach that is built on three guiding principles,” commissioner Jim Phillips said Wednesday at the ACC’s annual Football Kickoff media event.
“First, head-to-head results will always matter most. Second, no team will be unfairly rewarded or penalized based on the number of conference games it played. Third, 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 CFP (automatic bid). We’re confident this approach is fair, transparent, data-informed, and assures that our game features the two most deserving teams.”
That wasn’t the case last December.
Even though Miami was the ACC’s highest-ranked team at No. 12 and was tied with No. 17 Virginia for the league’s most overall wins with 10, the Hurricanes were passed over for a shot at the title because in a five-way tie for second place their winning percentage against conference opponents was lower than that of Duke.
That sent the Blue Devils, who went 6-2 in the ACC, into the title game despite a mediocre 7-5 record. It was a technicality that cost the league an automatic CFP bid, since its champion was not among the four highest-rated conference winners, and left Miami’s hopes up to the whim of a selection committee.
The Hurricanes were eventually the last team to squeak into the field, a decision that was widely criticised on social media at the time.
Under the new system, a team in a similar position won’t have to sweat as much. The team that advances to the ACC title game out of a tie involving three or more teams will now be the one with the strongest overall body of work as determined by SportSource Analytics, one of the measuring tools used by the CFP committee.
“You have to go and give an opportunity to place your two best teams,” Phillips said. “So 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.”
So is Miami coach Mario Cristobal, who naturally, is happy with the change even though it came a year too late for his 2025 team.
“I think it’s a positive step,” Cristobal said, praising Phillips for making the move. “But it’s difficult. Who could have predicted that there were going to be five teams locked with an equal record? If things had worked out differently, this probably would be a different rant.”
The tie-breaking procedure became an issue last season when the ACC decided to replace its traditional eight-game conference schedule to its current nine-game format.
Because nine games can’t be divided evenly in a 17-team team league, at least one team will always play fewer conference opponents than everybody else. This season, five teams – Boston College, Clemson, Florida State, Georgia Tech and North Carolina – will play only eight ACC games because of prior nonconference scheduling commitments.
“Our schedule’s not perfect coming up this year because we’re going into that transition period (and) we have an uneven number of teams in the conference,” Phillips said. “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.”