The ACC has several teams that can still come away with a conference championship in Charlotte, North Carolina, in a few weekends. The one they are vehemently against is Manny Diaz’s Duke Blue Devils.
As Yahoo Sports’ Nick Bromberg explained, Duke winning the ACC Championship could enable the James Madison Dukes to sneak into the College Football Playoff as the Sun Belt’s champion.
“We’ll be blunt: The ACC would very much prefer if Duke did not win the league. The Blue Devils’ chances took a huge hit Saturday with a home loss to Virginia but they are still alive to make the title game with games against North Carolina and Wake Forest remaining. If Duke won the ACC title at 8-5, there’s a great chance that James Madison would end up ranked ahead of the Blue Devils by the committee if the Dukes won the Sun Belt,” Bromberg wrote.
Duke, even at 5-5, has a chance to sneak into the ACC Championship Game as a two-loss team. The top of the ACC has six teams that are still in the hunt, though everyone else is, at worst, a three-loss team. A 10-win conference champion is enough to get any of them into the College Football Playoff field.
But a five-loss champion? Not in a million years. Not from the ACC, Big 12, or the Group of 5 ranks, anyway.
Jim Phillips has done well to keep the Florida State Seminoles and Clemson Tigers from imploding the conference, but not having a CFP selection in a 12-team field would make the commissioner’s job that much harder. The SEC and Big Ten are already circling their top teams like sharks. If either conference got up to five teams in the field, Phillips’ sell job to stay gets harder.
The best-case scenario would be the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets to win out and make the field as a one-loss team. Otherwise, the Virginia Cavaliers or Miami Hurricanes offer little controversy for the CFP selection committee.
Either way, this playoff system has issues, but Duke could actually make it fairer for the small schools, like, coincidentally, the Dukes, by winning their next three games and hoping enough things break their way across the conference.