ACC considering title game change that comes too late for Miami football

ACC commissioner Jim Phillips says the conference will re-examine the tiebreaker rules that sent 7-5 Duke to Charlotte over 10-2 Miami. For the Hurricanes, that kind of common-sense review is exactly what they wanted weeks ago, not after the damage is done.

Phillips acknowledged on Tuesday that the ACC will "explore changes" to its procedures for deciding which teams reach the conference title game. He even joked, "Who knew we would get to a seventh tiebreaker?"

Miami made the CFP but missed the ACC title game

Miami finished 10-2 overall and 6-2 in ACC play, part of a five-way tie for second place with Duke, Georgia Tech, Pitt and SMU. Duke emerged and went to Charlotte at 7-5 to face 10-2 Virginia.

The Blue Devils then beat Virginia 27-20 in overtime for their first outright ACC title since 1962, giving the conference an 8-5 champion and briefly putting its entire CFP outlook in doubt. In the current CFP format, where only the five highest-ranked conference champions are guaranteed spots, an unranked or low-ranked ACC champ could easily be squeezed out by champions from the American, Sun Belt, etc.

Miami athletic director Dan Radakovich had already been calling for this. Speaking to ESPN before the title game, Radakovich said the ACC needed to "revisit" a system that left its best-ranked team at home and pushed a Duke into a showcase that directly affects the CFP. He called the current setup "too complicated" and said the league has to "look at other options" to make sure it is "putting its best foot forward" on championship weekend.

Other conferences already lean on rankings or computer metrics when head-to-head and common opponents cannot break ties, and the American explicitly uses the CFP rankings in its tiebreakers. The ACC's current model, built for a divisional era that ended in 2023 and stretched across a 17-team conference with an eight-game schedule, was never designed for five-way ties and the general state of the current college football world.

There is also talk, via Ross Dellenger's reporting, of Phillips pushing for a standardized tiebreaker framework across the power conferences so everyone is playing by roughly the same rules.

At the end of the day it didn't end up hurting the Miami Hurricanes as they still made it into the CFP. But, the current format easily could have left out the ACC, and that is something the conference will need to address.