The ACC doomsday clock has ticked down to a minute and it’s closing in on midnight fast.
Pour one out for commissioner Jim Phillips and the rest of the league office, because Tuesday’s penultimate College Football Playoff rankings spelled out only one half-winning scenario for the conference that results in a single bid to the postseason tournament.
If it is even that lucky.
Because league officials will need to hope and pray that No. 17 Virginia wins in Charlotte on Saturday night or else the ACC will be left at home entirely for this year’s playoff. That is the bleak reality brought about by conference expansion, uneven schedules and a tiebreaker system that needs much more than your basic Math 101 class to understand.
It’s also the result of mediocre football from one coast of the country to the other kneecapping the ACC down the stretch.
The crux of the issue: Duke is the Cavaliers’ opponent this weekend and was unsurprisingly unranked by the selection committee. How could it not be? The Blue Devils were a measly 7–5—just one game above the bowl-eligibility minimum—and lost every one of their FBS nonconference games.
Manny Diaz’s team rebounded to go 6–2 in ACC play to win that complicated set of tiebreakers, but did not beat a single team that finished above .500 in the conference. Cal, Clemson and Wake Forest were all 4–4 in the standings and were Duke’s best wins.
They also lost to the Cavaliers on Nov. 15 in a 34–17 affair that saw the Blue Devils turn the ball over twice and allow 540 yards to a pretty dangerous attack led by quarterback Chandler Morris.
The selection committee could have allowed the potential storyline to fester quietly going into conference championship weekend depending on how they voted at the bottom of their Top 25, but they decided instead to throw fuel onto the fire by slotting in James Madison at No. 25.
“JMU has been a very consistent team throughout, a team we have talked about for the past couple of weeks, and they’ve been creeping and creeping,” committee chair Hunter Yurachek said. “Their strength of schedule really hasn’t improved that much, but they’re getting a lot of credit because they have gone through their schedule just with one loss earlier this year against a Louisville team that was ranked in our poll earlier, and they do have wins against an Old Dominion team that’s 9–3 and a Washington State team that took one of the ranked teams, Ole Miss, played them to a three-point game earlier this year, as well.”
Now if the Dukes win the Sun Belt championship game at home on Friday night, both they and the winner of the American title game between No. 20 Tulane and No. 24 North Texas will have a shot at making the CFP bracket. Even 10–2 UNLV playing in the Mountain West championship game would feel like it has a shot.
Should Duke win the ACC, though, then all signs point to both the American champion and James Madison, as ranked teams this week, making the field over an 8–5 Blue Devils team that was not (and probably won’t be even if it beats Virginia).
To lose by winning feels perfectly on brand for the ACC, but this is taking it to another level.
College Football Playoff rankings after Week 14
| Rank | Team | Change From Last Week |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ohio State | None |
| 2 | Indiana | None |
| 3 | Georgia | +1 |
| 4 | Texas Tech | +1 |
| 5 | Oregon | +1 |
| 6 | Mississippi | +1 |
| 7 | Texas A&M | -4 |
| 8 | Oklahoma | None |
| 9 | Alabama | +1 |
| 10 | Notre Dame | -1 |
| 11 | BYU | None |
| 12 | Miami | None |
| 13 | Texas | +3 |
| 14 | Vanderbilt | None |
| 15 | Utah | -2 |
| 16 | USC | +1 |
| 17 | Virginia | +1 |
| 18 | Arizona | +7 |
| 19 | Michigan | -4 |
| 20 | Tulane | +4 |
| 21 | Houston | NR |
| 22 | Georgia Tech | +1 |
| 23 | Iowa | NR |
| 24 | North Texas | None |
| 25 | James Madison | NR |
It often felt unfathomable that one of the four power-conference champions would ever be left out of the playoff once it expanded to 12 teams, but suddenly that’s very much in the cards. What should be a celebration of ACC football this season instead feels like the sword of Damocles is hovering above it for the long run-up to Selection Sunday and poised to drop.
Even if Virginia wins the league to cap off its second-ever double-digit winning season, it wouldn’t feel great for the rest of the membership knowing its highest-ranked team, No. 12 Miami, is almost assuredly out of the field.
The Hurricanes checked in at the same spot Tuesday as they were the week prior, confirming that even blowing out Pittsburgh to wrap the regular season had little bearing on the defining playoff debate in 2025 between Miami, No. 10 Notre Dame and the head-to-head result that has never seemed to matter.
“[The Hurricanes] really climbed faster than any other team during the past four or five weeks, up six spots. They’ve won four consecutive games. Carson Beck has been phenomenal, completing 80% of his passes at roughly 1,100 yards and 11 TDs during that time,” Yurachek said. “But the committee still felt like right now, Notre Dame deserves to be ranked ahead of BYU and Miami, and BYU deserves to be ranked ahead of Miami.”
With BYU’s opponent in the Big 12 title game in Texas Tech ranked No. 4 this week, that’s an indication that a Cougars victory on Saturday would allow both teams to make the field. If there’s some solace to fans on South Beach should that occur, at least it would mean that the Irish, too, would be on the outside of the CFP looking in.
Miami’s only potential path to the playoff may lie in No. 3 Georgia destroying No. 9 Alabama in the SEC championship game and BYU getting blown out by the Red Raiders in north Texas. That would theoretically push Miami and Notre Dame directly against each other for the potential right to be the last team in as an at-large.
“Idle teams can move based on the results of the championship games. There may be something that happens in a championship game that impacts an idle team, whether that’s their strength of schedule or some other datapoint that we use, or there could be a team that suffers a significant loss in a title game,” Yurachek said. “We don’t try to predict what’s going to happen, but yes, idle teams can move within the rankings as we rerank them one last time this weekend.”
Regardless what happens to Miami, though, the ACC is sweating out the next few days.
A Duke win would bring chaos to the bracket and to the conference it would have no qualms about winning for the first time since sharing a title in 1989.
Even Virginia hoisting the trophy is not without side effects as it would likely mean that it is the sole ACC representative in the playoff.
The clock is ticking going into conference championship weekend and when it comes to the ACC, that’s far from a good thing.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as College Football Playoff Rankings Expose ACC’s Nearly Inevitable Worst-Case Scenario.
