The Atlantic Coast Conference is revamping the tiebreaker format for its football championship game following a controversial finish last season that allowed a five-loss Duke team to get in over then-No. 10-ranked Miami — a situation that put the Hurricanes at risk of missing the expanded College Football Playoff. Miami, which had been the ACC's most dominant team during the regular season, wound up being selected for the playoff and went on to reach the national title game, where it fell short to No.
1 Indiana 27-21. Duke beat No. 20 Virginia in the ACC championship game last year for its first outright ACC title since 1962 but was not selected for the CFP, much to the dismay of Blue Devils coach Manny Diaz.
The new football championship tiebreaker policy will take effect beginning with the 2026 season, reflecting the league’s transition to a nine-game conference schedule and ensuring a fair and equitable process for determining participants in the ACC championship game, the league said. The updated tiebreaking procedure is built on three guiding principles: — Head-to-head results always will matter most. — No team will be overly rewarded or penalized based on the number of conference games it played. — 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 conference’s automatic qualifier to the College Football Playoff. "Our game will feature the two most deserving teams," ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said at ACC Kickoff on Wednesday in Charlotte.
Phillips said the third tier of that tiebreaker will be based on a SportSource Analytics metric used by the CFP. The updated policy was developed to reward head-to-head results and account for the league’s teams playing an alternate number of conference games while also identifying the two most deserving teams to compete for the ACC championship and the conference’s automatic berth into the CFP. The conference said the evaluation included more than 10,000 simulated season outcomes to ensure the model fairly addressed a wide range of championship scenarios.
The revised policy was approved following a comprehensive review by the ACC’s athletics directors. In December, the ACC announced that 12 of its 17 football-playing members would be playing a nine-game football schedule beginning in 2026 while five teams would play eight games. That made the head-to-head tiebreakers even more complicated than in the past.
The policy will operate as a bridge to accommodate conference games already on the books, with the plan to have 16 of 17 teams playing nine football games regularly by 2027. Reporting by The Associated Press.
