College Football Playoff breaking point? ACC tiebreaker chaos exposes flaw

Duke’s overtime win over No. 17 Virginia in the ACC Championship Game was a great moment for Duke as well as a warning for every other Power Four conference. Duke’s victory puts the ACC in a precarious position, as it could find itself without a representative in the College Football Playoff because of it. 

In an expanded 12-team field with automatic qualifiers for the five highest-ranked conference champions, this is borderline unfathomable. 

Duke is 8-5 and was not ranked by the committee last week, while Tulane and James Madison, two fellow conference champions, were. This is a problem facing the ACC this season, but in an age of bloated conferences, it could just as easily be the Big 12, Big Ten or SEC’s problem in the future if immediate changes are not enacted before next fall. 

Duke qualified for the ACC Championship Game because it was one of five teams tied for second at 6-2 in conference play. The ACC went through its list of tiebreakers and determined Duke was the beneficiary. None of the ACC’s tiebreakers involves a school’s position in the College Football Playoff Rankings.

That’s not the case in the American, where the third tiebreaker — after head-to-head and common opponents — is where the teams are ranked. The American does this to maximize its ability to qualify for one of the top-five conference champions that get an automatic bid to the playoff.

If the ACC followed a similar path, its championship game would’ve been No. 12 Miami versus No. 17 Virginia. The winner, no matter who it was, would’ve been in (and we would have eliminated one of this season’s great arguments, too, in the Miami vs. Notre Dame debate). 

Duke joins a list that should be impossible to reach in the modern CFP era. 
CBS Sports Research

College football, as a sport, has sold its soul to the College Football Playoff. Doing so has led to bloated conferences that no longer care about geography or tradition, which leads to far fewer crossover games between conference opponents. This was not a problem in the Big Ten or Big 12 this season as their respective participants separated from the pack. It could’ve been a problem in the SEC, though. There were four SEC teams tied atop the league at 7-1, and the league’s tiebreakers set up a game between No. 3 Georgia and No. 9 Alabama.

The SEC goes through a series of tiebreakers that begin with head-to-head results, but end with a random draw. It’s a bit wild to know a random draw could determine the participants of a game with so much on the line, isn’t it? Some might think it stupid!

This year, Georgia beat Alabama, which now has us all wondering if Alabama will hold on to an at-large bid in the field. But what if, in the case of a multi-way tie atop the league like the one the SEC had this year, it went off CFP rankings? The game would’ve been between No. 3 Georgia and No. 6 Ole Miss. That would’ve been a circus of its own right considering Lane Kiffin’s departure, but no matter the result, the SEC could have rested easy knowing both would remain in the field, as would Texas A&M, Alabama and Oklahoma.

Last season, the Big 12 had four teams finish 7-2 in conference, and tiebreakers paired No. 15 Arizona State and No. 16 Iowa State, the league’s two highest-ranked teams. No harm, no foul. But what if tiebreakers had paired 9-3 Colorado against No. 18 BYU? The Buffaloes were No. 23 going into championship weekend, behind both Boise State and UNLV from the Mountain West, and just ahead of Army and Memphis from the American. Odds are, Colorado would’ve remained ahead of the American champion with a win over BYU, but the league would’ve been in an iffy situation.

I don’t know what the long-term prospects are for conference championship games, but I do know that leagues like having them, and television networks like having them because they generate revenue. So they’d like them to stick around, but they also don’t want them to cost money in the long run by taking teams out of playoff contention.

So in order to minimize the risk, every single league should involve CFP rankings as a tiebreaker, and they shouldn’t be the third or fourth option. They shouldn’t fall lower than second. The first should be head-to-head — at least then we’ll know results matter somewhere — and then if that doesn’t work because you’re only playing half your giant conference, the CFP rankings should be second.

You’ve already changed the foundation of the sport to service the College Football Playoff. It only makes sense to change your tiebreakers, too.