ACC Commissioner floats the idea of making changes to ACC Championship

ACC commissioner Jim Phillips says he has some tweaks to the conference championship he will discuss with programs. (Photo: Jim Dedmon / USATODAY)

David Hood - Senior Writer - Monday, January 20 2025

See what you did, Clemson? See it?

According to a report released by ESPN’s Andrea Adelson Sunday evening, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips is weighing the option of giving the regular season champ a bye and having the second and third-place finishers play in the conference championship game.

In Adelson’s story, Phillips cited the comments from SMU coach Rhett Lashlee about his team maybe being better off not playing in the conference title game to ensure a CFP berth.

"The conference championship games are important, as long as we make them important, right?" Phillips said. "Do you play two (second-place finisher) versus three (third place)? You go through the regular season and whoever wins the regular season, just park them to the side, and then you play the second-place team versus the third-place team in your championship game. So you have a regular-season champion, and then you have a conference tournament or postseason champion.''

To recap – Lashlee’s Mustangs cruised to an 11-1 record during the regular season, and that included a perfect 8-0 mark in ACC play. That earned SMU a berth in the ACC Championship Game, where it faced off against a three-loss Clemson team. SMU started off with a No. 13 ranking in the initial College Football Playoff rankings on November 5th, spent the next two weeks at No. 14 and No. 13 before spending the next two weeks at No. 8 and No. 9.

With so much national buzz about the SEC and how many teams from that conference deserved a bid, Lashlee did an interview with On3 prior to the game against Clemson and he was asked if coaches will consider boycotting conference title games if his program dropped below Alabama in the final rankings.

"Yes," Lashlee said without hesitation. "If our team all got COVID today and didn't play, we're in. We're in, right? We don't have another data point to drop us below anybody that's behind us. So yeah, I think if you open up that door, you’re going to see a lot of people do a lot of crazy things. We’re not going to. We’re going to go play in Charlotte, and we’re going to try to compete for our championship, because that’s the right thing to do. That’s what competitors do. We value an opportunity to share the field with someone like Clemson."

The Mustangs lost to Clemson in the ACC Championship Game and were forced to wonder if they would make the top 12. The Mustangs did, settling in at No. 10, and lost at Penn St. in a rout in the first round of the College Football Playoff.

Of course, the ACC wants as many bids as possible, and according to Adelson, Phillips said the league could consider giving its regular-season champion a bye, and have the teams that finish second or third in the league standings play in the ACC championship game.

He said another possibility is having the top 4 teams play on the final weekend of the regular season: first place versus fourth place, and second place vs. third place, with the winners playing the following weekend in the ACC championship game.

Phillips said he will suggest the change on a call with the league’s head coaches this week and that those conversations will continue at the winter meetings. For coaches who already are dealing with an early signing period and the transfer portal as the calendar turns to December, another game doesn’t seem like a great selling point.

But Phillips and the ACC would prefer to keep the conference championship game and the money that comes with it.

"The conference championship games are important, as long as we make them important, right?" Phillips said. "Do you play two versus three? You go through the regular season and whoever wins the regular season, just park them to the side, and then you play the second-place team versus the third-place team in your championship game. So you have a regular-season champion, and then you have a conference tournament or postseason champion. That's one of the options, depending on how you treat the conference champions, or that championship game, you may want to do it different.

"I have alluded to that in some of our every-other-week-AD calls, and these are some of the things moving forward. We want to have a recap of the regular season, postseason, and what do we think moving forward?"

The ACC has embarked on some silly quests – who remembers the failed alliance with the Pac-12 and the Big 10, where those three conferences embarked on a handshake agreement to work together to solve issues in the brave new world of college football expansion? The Big 10 shook hands and then went and poached and USC and UCLA from their “partner” and later took Oregon and Washington. The Pac-12 folded, the Big 10 got stronger, and the ACC was left to…..

Left to consider silly ideas like this one.