CHARLOTTE – It’s usually an honor to have something named after you.
This isn’t one of those times.
When the new ACC tiebreaker format that was announced at the league’s Football Kickoff event on last Wednesday it was referred to as “The Duke Rule,” but it’s not a tribute to the defending conference champions.
It’s a direct insinuation that the Blue Devils shouldn’t have had the chance to play for the title last December, let alone win it. And Blue Devils coach Manny Diaz isn’t happy about it.
“I heard we got a rule named after us. That’s pretty cool, right? The Duke tiebreaker rule,” Diaz said during his opening remarks at the ACC’s preseason media event in Charlotte. “I want to start by just addressing our thoughts on that. Inherent in the narrative of changing a tiebreaker for the conference championship game is the assertion that last year’s team was undeserved of being in the championship game.
“You hear that word that now there will be more deserved teams in the championship game. I want to push back against that narrative. I think it’s not just false, I think it’s insulting.”
Diaz’s team went 6-2 in the conference last season, finishing in a four-way tie for second place with Miami, SMU, Georgia Tech and Pittsburgh. It earned the right to play first place Virginia because the winning percentage of its league opponents was higher than the other teams in the group.
That became cause for criticism from those – both in and out of the ACC – who believed that 12th-ranked Miami was more deserving of the title shot. The Hurricanes were 10-2 at the time and one of only two other conference teams besides Virginia to make the final regular season College Football Playoff rankings. The Blue Devils were 7-5 overall and unranked.
But despite that disparity, Diaz has no apologies for either his team’s participation in the championship game or the 27-20 overtime victory that gave Duke its first title since 1989.
“We thoroughly deserved the victory and a great game against an outstanding Virginia team,” he said. “
Under the ACC’s new tiebreaker system, the team advancing to the ACC title game from 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.
Diaz isn’t convinced that’s any better than the old format because of the subjective nature of the analytics and the fact that its mathematically impossible for everyone in a 17-team league to play nine conference games. At least one ACC team will always play fewer league opponents than everyone else. This season five teams – Boston College, Clemson, Florida State, Georgia Tech and North Carolina – will play only eight because of prior nonconference scheduling commitments.
“We’re in a competition. That’s what this is,” Diaz said. “Seventeen teams showed up here this weekend to compete for one championship. The most simple way to do that is if we could all play each other, right? But we can’t do that, there’s too many damn teams.
“It would be great to have head-to-head. It would be cool to have common opponents, but it’s hard to have enough common opponents. The one thing you can do is you can add up all the wins and losses and add up all the wins and losses of the eight teams that you played against or the nine teams this year. By that metric, which is the most objective metric that you can possibly have, there’s no feelings or emotions involved.”
Diaz, by contrast, has plenty of feelings and emotions about his 2025 Blue Devils. And not just toward those who question the legitimacy of their accomplishment. He’s also unhappy that as champions of the ACC, Duke was sent to El Paso, Texas to the Sun Bowl instead of being included in the 12-team College Football Playoff field.
Miami, which went on to play Indiana for the national championship, was selected as an at-large participant, was the only ACC team in the Playoff. While Diaz acknowledges that the Hurricanes deserved to be one of the 12 teams competing for the title, he believes his team should have been in the conversation as well.
“Whoever wins the competition in this league, and what should be the discourse in this league, is that the conference champion should go to the CFP. That should happen,” Diaz said. “It’s a respect for the league. It’s a respect for what it means to play in this league. It’s a respect to be one of the final two standing in this league. Miami should have been in before that (final) weekend, but when we start talking about analytics and we start talking about committees, then that’s how people start getting flip-flopped.”
It’s a situation that won’t come into play this year now that the CFP has adopted automatic qualifying spots for each of the four power conference winners.