ACC considering change to title game, could affect Clemson-Carolina game

The Atlantic Coast Conference is considering making changes to its annual ACC Championship Game format, at least that’s the idea commissioner Jim Phillips gave to the media Sunday as the nation prepares for the College Football Playoff National Championship Game Monday night.

Phillips said in a report from ESPN The ACC could consider giving its regular-season champion a bye and have the teams that finish second or third in the league 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 against three? You go through the regular season and whoever wins the regular season, you just park them to the side and then you play the second-place team against the third-place team in your championship game. So you have a champion in the regular season and then you have a conference tournament or postseason championship.

“That’s one of the options, depending on how you treat the conference champions, or that championship game, you might want to do it differently.”

What is the other option?

According to the report, Phillips’ other option is for the league to 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.

“I’ve alluded to it in some of our AD calls every other week, and those are some of the things moving forward,” Phillips said. “We want a recap of the regular season, the postseason and what do we think going 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 these things can certainly have an impact on potential TV revenue.

But in this scenario, ACC has to work through a few issues to make it work. First, how does the league handle scheduling? Does every team leave the schedule blank in 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, a team would have a void in their schedule because football has 17 members. Most likely, the last team in the conference standings will be left out.

Another issue 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 in the final week of the regular season.

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

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

It also means 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 one final home game to end the regular season.

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

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

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

That could be a possibility if the playoff field expands, but there’s no guarantee of anything at the moment.

But first, Phillips will have to speak with his head coaches and from there, talks will continue at the league’s winter meets next month in Charlotte, North Carolina, which, he said, is already a topic among the league’s athletic directors.