Goodbye, divisions. Hello, common sense.
The ACC announced Tuesday it is officially moving to a 3-5-5 scheduling model starting with the 2023 football season. The new format slashes the league’s Coastal and Atlantic divisions in favor of one 14-team free-for-all. That sets up an ACC title game that will feature the two best teams based on conference winning percentage. It also assigns each team three primary rivals to play annually while facing all 13 conference opponents home and away at least once during a preliminary four-year cycle that goes through 2026.
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The change is largely positive and in the best interest of a conference that routinely fights perception issues when it comes to being deserving of the College Football Playoff. The Pac-12 already ditched divisions in May, the current 10-member Big 12 doesn’t have them and the SEC and Big Ten are both exploring similar division-less models.
Let’s evaluate what the ACC got right and what it got wrong.
In 2023, the ACC will adopt a 3-5-5 football scheduling model and all 14 schools will compete in one division.
Teams will play 3 primary opponents annually + face the other 10 teams twice during the 4-year cycle, once at home and once on the road.
📰: https://t.co/7cvsuH48j3 pic.twitter.com/ne5TjwtfYd
— ACC Football (@ACCFootball) June 28, 2022
What the ACC got right
1. Prioritizing better competition
It’s no secret that the league’s best chance of earning a CFP berth runs through Clemson. The Tigers made the Playoff every season from 2015-20 and won two national championships along the way. But even with Clemson’s success, the Tigers have still consistently fought the idea that their ACC competition is too easy — something the new model helps combat.
The new schedule can’t make ACC teams any more talented or help coaches scheme better. But it can guarantee that the Tigers (or other Playoff contenders from the ACC) are being challenged, at least semi-regularly, by the best the conference has to offer. Clemson and Miami, for example, two of the league’s flashier programs in 2022 with top recruiting operations, have met just twice in the regular season in the past seven years. Under the current model, the two teams meet in 2022 as cross-divisional opponents, and now they will also play at Miami in 2023 and at Clemson in 2024.
Increased competition enhances the ACC’s chances of putting more than one team into the Playoff. And perhaps most importantly, the format likely elevates the league’s championship game.
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Clemson’s dominance has often made the title games uncompetitive duds. Pitt finally got over the hump in 2021, beating Clemson in the regular season and Wake Forest in the ACC championship, but the last team standing out of Coastal Chaos (known for its mediocrity/parity) has historically been unable to hold up against the Tigers. From 2015-19, Clemson beat Coastal teams in the championship game by an average of 25.4 points.
But contrary to popular perception, Clemson played a team with an equal conference record or the second-best record in the ACC behind the Tigers in every conference title game from 2015-20 except for one.
That exception, in 2016, was a big one, though. The Tigers entered the title game 7-1 in the Atlantic division, and instead of facing Louisville, which was also 7-1 in the Atlantic, played 6-2 Virginia Tech of the Coastal division. Louisville had to play No. 2 Florida State and No. 5 Clemson during the regular season. Virginia Tech’s only ranked ACC matchup came against No. 17 North Carolina.
Had the Tigers and Cardinals met in the ACC championship, the game would have served as a highly anticipated rematch of a regular-season classic that drew nearly 9.5 million viewers and came down to Louisville coming up 1 yard short of a fourth-and-12 conversion with 33 seconds remaining at Death Valley. Lamar Jackson, the Cardinals’ eventual Heisman Trophy winner, would have gotten another crack at Deshaun Watson and the Tigers on a neutral field. But divisions set up the Tigers and Hokies to play in a poorly-watched ACC championship that drew just 5.3 million viewers, according to sportsmediawatch.com.
The CFP selection committee didn’t punish Clemson for beating the Hokies 42-35 but made it clear it thought more of Louisville than it did Virginia Tech, ranking the Cardinals No. 13 on selection day and the Hokies No. 22.
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2. (Most) traditional rivalries remain intact
North Carolina-NC State, UNC-Duke, Virginia-Virginia Tech and Florida State-Miami were matchups the conference knew it had to prioritize when it assigned teams their three annual opponents. Syracuse, Pitt and Boston College all being regular opponents not only makes geographical sense, but harkens back to their days in the Big East.
Meanwhile, UNC will still regularly get to play Virginia in the “South’s Oldest Rivalry,” which dates back to 1892 and has featured 126 meetings. Clemson and Georgia Tech, separated by just 121 miles on I-85, will also continue thier annual series — one that dates back to 1898 with 87 meetings.
Then there are the rivalries that make for strong football and even better television. By keeping Clemson on Florida State’s annual schedule, there’s hope that two of the conference’s most historically dominant teams can go head to head with national ramifications on the line … if the Seminoles get straightened out sooner than later. FSU hasn’t had a conference record above .500 since going 5-3 in 2016.
3. The athlete and fan experience
Any six-year senior at Virginia in 2021 went his entire career without ever hosting Clemson. The Tigers haven’t been to Charlottesville, Va., since 2013.
Syracuse and Miami have played once since the Orange joined the conference in 2013, and never at Syracuse. Florida State made its first trip to North Carolina since 2009 just last season. Miami and Wake Forest will have gone 11 years without playing each other (2013, 2024), as the 2020 game was wiped out due to COVID-19.
Correcting the droughts and making sure schools get the full ACC tour was a major factor in the decision for commissioner Jim Phillips and the league. Every team should get to experience “Enter Sandman” at Virginia Tech, the hill at Death Valley, Pitt’s NFL stadium home at Heinz Field and so on.
What the ACC got wrong
1. No Virginia Tech and Miami?
Virginia Tech and Miami first played in 1953 and have met every year since 1992, splitting the series 15-15 since then. But the former Big East foes didn’t make it as permanent opponents, qualifying as the most egregious whiff by the ACC.
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Virginia Tech’s three annual opponents consist of Virginia, Pitt and Wake Forest. Miami has Boston College, Florida State and Louisville.
The ACC could have made a quick scheduling swap. Miami’s Louisville matchup could have gone to Pitt, which the Hokies could have dropped for the Hurricanes.
2. And what about Wake Forest-NC State? Georgia Tech-Duke?
It’s difficult to satisfy every fan base’s wants with an undertaking as large as the ACC’s on Tuesday, but Wake Forest can make multiple complaints. For one, the Demon Deacons are the only team in North Carolina with just one in-state rival on their annual list instead of two. And that rival is … Duke? The ACC pairing Wake Forest with Duke instead of NC State is hard to reconcile.
NC State has faced the Demon Deacons more times than any other opponent in its 129 years of football, with 115 meetings. Their rivalry is the second-longest continuously played series in college football, dating back to 1910.
The Wolfpack lead the overall series 67-42-6, but Wake Forest got the best of NC State in one of the ACC’s most exciting games in 2021, when the Demon Deacons won 45-42 and stayed undefeated in the Atlantic division.
Georgia Tech-Duke also didn’t make the cut, even though the teams have met every season since their first matchup in 1933 in the longest continuously played series on the Yellow Jackets’ schedule.
3. Still no Notre Dame
The Fighting Irish have made it clear they do not plan to give up their independence, and unless the CFP forces them to join a conference in order to compete for a national championship, why would they?
That’s still the ACC’s problem, though.
The ACC is stuck in its television deal with ESPN through the 2035-36 season and is already expected to be lapped in television revenue by its peer conferences in the coming years. With Texas and Oklahoma set to join the SEC in 2025 (or earlier), the ACC will only keep falling behind.
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Notre Dame, as the league knows so well, could help. The ACC generated nearly $580 million in revenue for the 2020-21 fiscal year, according to federal tax documents — a conference record that marked an $80 million increase from 2019-20. Part of that extra money came from Notre Dame sharing its home game TV revenue from NBC with the league during 2020, when the Fighting Irish temporarily joined the conference during the pandemic. Seemingly a win-win for both sides, the ACC’s total revenue went up and Notre Dame got a $10.8 million bump from the conference compared to 2019-20, when it wasn’t a full member of the league.
When Clemson and Notre Dame met in the title game in 2020, when the ACC scrapped divisions, the matchup became the most-viewed ACC title game in conference history. More than 10 million viewers tuned in — making it the second-most viewed college football game of the season across all networks at the time.
But Notre Dame returned to its revered independence in 2021. And with the new scheduling model, nothing changes for the Fighting Irish. They’re still expected to play five ACC opponents on average per year without an obligation to join the conference.
(Photo: Jim Dedmon / USA Today)
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