The ACC is a mess, and desperate times call for desperate measures — like rooting for Virginia Jay Busbee December 5, 2025 at 12:41 AM 0 The ACC has produced three of the last 12 college football national champions, boasting a legacy that's rich if not exactly evenly distributed throughout the conference. But this is 2020s college football, where yesterday only counts if you lost to an unranked team, and 12 years ago might as well be the Mesozoic Era.
- - The ACC is a mess, and desperate times call for desperate measures — like rooting for Virginia
Jay Busbee December 5, 2025 at 12:41 AM
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The ACC has produced three of the last 12 college football national champions, boasting a legacy that's rich if not exactly evenly distributed throughout the conference. But this is 2020s college football, where yesterday only counts if you lost to an unranked team, and 12 years ago might as well be the Mesozoic Era.
Today, thanks to an ugly combination of bad losses, bad timing, bad luck and bad coaching, the ACC is in very real danger of missing the College Football Playoff entirely.
Put another way: The ACC is one bad game away from scrapping with the American and Sun Belt conferences for slots in the CFP. All due respect to the American and Sun Belt, but they aren't exactly the conference of Bobby Bowden, Duke-Carolina and The U. (And if you can name all the members of those two conferences off the top of your head, I hope you're getting paid for your ball knowledge.)
Virginia plays Duke this Saturday in the ACC championship, and the entire conference will be rooting so hard for the Cavaliers that Duke might as well be an out-of-conference opponent. The 8-5 Blue Devils managed to win a five-way tiebreaker with Miami, Pitt, Georgia Tech and SMU despite the fact that literally every one of those teams finished with a better overall record than Duke. That's obviously not Duke's fault; you play the schedule you're given, and the conference slate broke the Blue Devils' way. (Tiebreakers in bloated conferences are an offseason matter for discussion.)
Virginia beat Duke 34-17 in Durham on Nov. 15 in a game that wasn't as close as the final score appears. (Photo by Lance King/Getty Images) (Lance King via Getty Images)
If Virginia, currently ranked 17th in the CFP standings, wins on Saturday, no problem; the 10-2 Cavs, as ACC champion, will slot into the 11th seed as a deserving CFP participant. But if Duke wins … oh, then we have trouble.
The CFP grants automatic berths to the champions of the five highest-ranked conferences, and the American's Tulane and North Texas, and the Sun Belt's James Madison, are all ranked ahead of Duke.
The conference might still slide in via the at-large route; Miami sits at No. 12 in the CFP rankings and is idle this weekend. A loss by No. 11 BYU in the Big 12 championship would set up a head-to-head comparison with No. 10 Notre Dame, which Miami beat earlier this season. And if No. 9 Alabama gets its crimson doors blown off in the SEC championship, that could open another spot in the CFP bracket.
Absent that possibility, though, the chances of an ACC lockout ride on the 3.5-point-favorite Cavaliers. And with that lockout will come both financial and reputational hits.
Per the CFP's own revenue distribution formula, conferences receive $4 million for every team that makes the 12-team field, as well as for every team that reaches the quarterfinals. Teams that reach the semis and the national championship game get another $6 million apiece for their conferences. Over and above that, conferences whose teams make the CFP field each receive another $3 million to cover expenses for each round.
Let's say both Miami and Virginia make the CFP. That's a tidy $14 mil right there for the conference, just for showing up. Money, not "conference pride," is why conference presidents and head coaches lobby so hard to be added to the CFP field. No schools in the mix, no money … and given the fact that the ACC almost surely never expected to be in this situation, the absence of an expected check is going to cause a little short-term pain. (Don't weep for the poor conferences, they'll be just fine.)
The ACC has always occupied a strange space in the college football pantheon. Sure, every so often they'd run out a Clemson or a Miami or a Florida State to lay waste to the country, but the rank-and-file of the league is the collection of East Coast nerd schools — not an insult! — for whom football is maybe their fifth- or sixth-most notable contribution to the national character. Virginia, Duke, North Carolina, Georgia Tech, Wake Forest … all outstanding institutions of higher learning, but not exactly known football terrors.
And here's where the idea of "conference pride" comes into play. In the new world of college football, there's no stable ground, not for players, not for programs, not for conferences. The Pac-12, with its 110 years of history, was stripped for parts and left by the roadside, plummeting from the ranks of the Power Five to the Group of Five with all the grace of a fast-food drive-through bag hurled out the window.
Yes, legal and financial guardrails remain in place to protect the ACC's integrity as a conference. But guardrails can be vaulted; it's why the ACC now includes such notable Atlantic coast schools as SMU, Stanford and Cal, for instance. And guardrails can be torn away entirely, too, as the Pac-12 can attest.
Every misstep, mistake and missed tournament puts the ACC closer to an oblivion that the SEC and Big Ten simply don't face. The less notable the ACC is in football conversations, the more likely it slides into irrelevance. Losing a Clemson or a Florida State in itself wouldn't kill the conference; losing a straightforward pathway into the College Football Playoff just might.
So while the ACC surely wants all of its teams to perform well on the national stage, you can understand why the conference might be cheering a bit harder for Virginia than Duke this weekend.
Source: "AOL Sports"
Source: Sports
Published: December 04, 2025 at 09:27PM on Source: ANDY MAG
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