The 2025 ACC football season created a big problem: Five-loss Duke won the ACC Championship Game over Virginia. Because Duke had five losses, the College Football Playoff policy of including the five highest-ranked conference champions put James Madison in the field, not the ACC champion. The ACC should consider itself fortunate that Miami got in over Notre Dame. Had it not, the ACC would have been completely shut out of the playoff field.

It therefore rates as no surprise that the ACC and commissioner Jim Phillips are thinking about revising conference tiebreakers, as reported by Ross Dellenger of Yahoo! Sports.

This is a more complicated discussion than simply revising tiebreakers, however. Let's explore this topic with the level of detail it deserves:

Why current tiebreakers don't work

The reality of having a 17-team conference in the ACC -- 16 in the SEC, 18 in the Big Ten -- means not all teams are going to play each other. This is why three- or four-team head-to-heads won't often exist. Tiebreakers often get into common conference opponents and winning percentage against other teams in the conference, but that's not really a true measure of how good a team is within the conference. Revising tiebreakers to reward head-to-head results, even if they don't apply in all four directions, is a good start, but it's not a full solution.

College Football Playoff policy must change most of all

The College Football Playoff, more than the ACC, needs to change its policies. The policy of having the five highest-ranked conference champions is a flawed policy. The CFP needs to change one word: "champions" must become "representatives."

Conference championships are local, not national, matters

The ACC and other conferences shouldn't choose a champion. The conference schedule should create the champion itself. The ACC and other conferences should choose the team they want to represent the conference in the CFP.

Translated: Duke is the legitimate ACC champion, but Miami is the ACC representative. If the policy shifts from champions to representatives, this problem gets solved. However, that's not the full story.

Improving the conference schedule

The best solution to all of this is not merely to revise tiebreakers or CFP policy, even though those two reforms would be very helpful. The best solution is to implement the flex game.

In Week 8 (or 9, or 7 -- midway through the season is the point of emphasis here), the ACC and other conferences would look at the conference standings and identify the top teams. If the pre-set conference schedule does not have Team A playing Team B, and those two teams are top contenders for the conference championship, the ACC and the other conferences would set a flex game for Week 12.

The Week 12 date would be set aside as a flex-game spot on the schedule before the season. Home and road assignments would be put in place before the season as well and would rotate each year.

2025 ACC football example

How this would have worked in the ACC: Miami and Georgia Tech would have played a flex game. SMU and Virginia would have played. Pittsburgh and Duke would have played. The other 10 teams in the conference would have played flex games as well. In 2026, teams which played home games in 2025 would go on the road, and vice-versa.

This, even more than changing tiebreakers, would create better conference races.

Other reforms are needed, too

We still haven't covered the full range of reforms needed to improve the integrity of conference races and the product of college football. The ACC and other conferences should create bubble play-in (and elimination) games for the CFP. Imagine having Miami play Alabama in early December instead of the Canes sitting home. It's true Miami got in, but having teams fully punch their ticket with big December wins would be easier and cleaner than hoping the committee does its job.

Postscript for the ACC

As a postscript to all of this, it's worth asking this question: If Virginia had beaten Duke to make the playoff, would the committee have still included Miami over Notre Dame to give the ACC two teams? We will never know the answer, but it's possible that Duke winning actually made the committee less inclined to exclude the ACC, with James Madison grabbing a spot which might have gone to Notre Dame had Virginia won on Saturday.

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This article originally appeared on College Sports Wire: ACC mulls tiebreaker change after Duke mess, but it's not that simple

Reporting by Matt Zemek, College Sports Wire / College Sports Wire

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