ACC chaos will be handled differently going forward, commissioner Jim Phillips announced Wednesday at the conference’s media days in Charlotte, North Carolina. The league, following a thorough analysis that included more than 10,000 simulated season outcomes, has adopted a new tiebreaker system for its championship game.
It’s a much-needed modification after last season, in which Duke — despite winning only seven regular-season games overall — reached the conference title game via a five-way tie for second place.
The Blue Devils, who wound up winning the ACC yet missing out on the College Football Playoff since they weren’t one of the five highest-ranked conference champions, took a spot in the league championship that could have been occupied by Miami. The Hurricanes, of course, snuck into the 12-team CFP field with an at-large bid and made a run to the national title game.
But during the 2026 campaign, each Power 4 conference winner will be crowned an automatic qualifier for the CFP, regardless of ranking. That put an added onus on the ACC revising its tiebreaker policy, with Phillips stressing Wednesday at the podium that it’s imperative to “give an opportunity to place your two best teams.”
The model that will be first implemented this season still values head-to-head above all else. If that doesn’t separate tied teams, however, “the team with the strongest overall body of work will earn the opportunity to compete for the ACC championship and the CFP AQ,” Phillips said.
Phillips, now in his sixth year leading the ACC after serving as Northwestern’s longtime athletic director, explained that no team will be unfairly rewarded or penalized based on the number of conference games it plays. Beyond the 2026 season, every league team will participate in nine conference games annually, with the exception of one, which will play only eight due to the ACC having an uneven number of football programs (17).
This season, though, as the conference is still transitioning to that scheduling model and previously penciled in non-conference matchups remain on the calendar, 12 teams will have nine ACC games and five will have eight conference contests.
Duke slipped into the ACC title game last season with a 6-2 league record and ultimately because of the conference winning percentage of their opponents, winning the aforementioned five-way tie for a chance to play CFP hopeful Virginia.
Manny Diaz’s Blue Devils went on to upset UVA, collecting their first outright ACC championship since 1962. That said, even then, it was clear that a change to the ACC’s tiebreaker system was on the horizon.
Phillips was asked later in his forum on Wednesday about how exactly a team’s “body of work” will be quantified. He detailed that the ACC will refer to the Team Success Ranking provided by SportSource Analytics to determine that metric, a ranking the CFP also uses in its evaluation process, according to Phillips.
“What’s changed this year is that there’s an AQ awarded for the Power 4 conferences,” Phillips said. “And so you have to do everything you can to position your championship game with those two best teams.
“Head-to-head matters. That’s always most important. And then we will look at the grouping and how teams fared in the conference season, but it will come down to body of work: So who you play, when you play, the games that you win — non-conference as well as conference will matter. And that’s a change. That’s a major change in college sports and certainly for the ACC.”
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