Tag: ClemsonCarolina

The Atlantic Coast Conference is considering making changes to its annual ACC Championship Game format, at least that is the idea Commissioner Jim Phillips pitched to the media Sunday as the nation gets set for the College Football Playoff National Championship Game on Monday night.

Phillips said in a report by ESPN the ACC 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.

“The conference championship games are important, as long as we make them important, right?” Phillips said in the article. “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.”

What is the other option?

According to the report, Phillips’ other option is the league consider the possibility of having the top 4 teams play in an ACC Playoff on the final weekend of the regular season. In this scenario, first place would play the fourth-place team, and second place would play third place.

The two winners would play the following weekend in the ACC championship game.

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

Phillips plans to get a feel from the league’s head coaches on a conference call next week. The idea stems from Rhett Lashlee’s comments prior to the ACC Championship Game.

Lashlee said SMU might be better off not playing in the title game to protect their seeding. At the time, the Mustangs were ranked No. 8 in the CFP Rankings. After losing to Clemson, they fell to No. 11, and just barely made the CFP.

Obviously, adding two playoff games to the ACC season could give the conference two more revenue streams, as well as add a little more flavor to the conference’s regular season, which could also boost revenue. All of those things could definitely have an impact on potential television revenue.

However, in this scenario, the ACC will have to work through a couple of issues to make it work. First off, how does the league handle the scheduling? Does every team leave the schedule blank on the final week of the season?

Obviously, in this scenario, the league would have to schedule games based on seedings and because Notre Dame is not a football member, one team will have a void in their schedule because football has 17 members. Most likely, the last place team in the conference standings will be left out.

Another problem is the ACC’s annual rivalry games against the SEC. Clemson-South Carolina, Florida State-Florida, Georgia Tech-Georgia and Louisville-Kentucky all currently play on the final week of the regular season.

What happens to those games? It is not as simple as just moving them.

For instance, if the ACC wants to move the Clemson-South Carolina game, South Carolina will have to get it worked out with the SEC since the league sets up all the conference and non-conference games. The SEC might not want to mess with it.

Also, does this mean the ACC goes to a nine-game schedule in conference play, meaning everyone still gets four home and four road games and the top eight teams earn a final home game to close the regular season.

How will the ACC handle that, especially when it has to consider the rivalry games too? Understand, at least with the Clemson-South Carolina game, the Tigers home schedule is set on years it will host the Gamecocks and on years that it does not, with the goal of having a seventh home game to help with revenue.

In other words, Clemson does not want to lose a home game if the ACC moves to a nine-game schedule on the years it plays South Carolina in Columbia.

Then there is giving the regular season champion a bye and playing the second and third place teams in the title game. The goal is to potentially give the ACC an opportunity to have two teams make the playoffs every year, but there is no guarantee that will happen in the 12-team playoff.

It could be a possibility if the playoff field is expanded, but there is no guarantee of anything at this moment.

But first, Phillips has to talk to his head coaches and from there the conversations will continue at the league’s winter meetings next month in Charlotte, North Carolina, which as he mentioned is already a topic among the league’s athletics directors.