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Credit the ACC for creative thinking, but its proposed championship game changes aren’t the answer
When is a championship game not a championship game?
If you think that’s a silly question, wait until you hear the answer ACC commissioner Jim Phillips provided this week during an interview in Atlanta leading up to the College Football Playoff final.
Phillips told ESPN’s Andrea Adelson that he plans to discuss potential changes to the conference’s championship game format with his coaches and athletic directors during their upcoming winter meetings.
Among the proposals is a plan that would keep the league’s regular-season champion on the sideline watching while teams that finished 2nd and 3rd in the standings play for the “title.”
Seriously.
“Whoever wins the regular season, just park them to the side and then you play the 2nd-place team versus the 3rd-place team in your championship game,” Phillips said, presumably with a straight face. “So you have a regular-season champion and then you have a conference tournament or postseason championship.”
You have to give Phillips credit for trying. Considering the current landscape of college athletics, the ACC has to do whatever it can to maintain its status as a power conference.
But a non-championship championship game?
It sounds as if Phillips has been hanging around Rob Manfred, exchanging ideas with his off-the-deep-end Major League Baseball counterpart. Because on the silliness scale of contrived sports gimmicks, the ACC’s proposal ranks right up there with putting a runner on second base to start extra innings and Manfred’s “Golden At-Bat” nonsense.
Phillips also floated the idea of staging a mini-tournament on the final weekend of the regular season with the top 4 teams playing to determine which 2 advance to the championship game the following week.
While that sounds more plausible than the alternative plan, it would create a scheduling and logistical nightmare in the context of a 12-game schedule with 8 conference dates — not to mention ruining traditional Rivalry Week matchups such as FSU-Florida, Clemson-South Carolina, Ga. Tech-Georgia. It might be a better idea just to scrap the championship game altogether.
The genesis of the ACC’s championship game discussions is a comment made by SMU coach Rhett Lashlee a few days before his regular-season champion Mustangs took on Clemson in Charlotte for the 2024 title.
At 11-1 and solidly in the Playoff field at No. 8 in the rankings, Lashlee suggested that his team might be better off opting out of the game to protect its advantageous standing.
“If our team all got COVID today and didn’t play, we’re in,” he said. “We’re in. We (wouldn’t) have another data point to drop us below anybody that’s behind us.”
The Mustangs had everything to lose and nothing to gain besides a nice memento for the school’s trophy case by playing. And they nearly did lose it all after Clemson’s Nolan Hauser kicked a 56-yard field goal as time expired to beat them.
They still squeaked into the 12-team Playoff field. But not without 12 sleepless hours of worrying and widespread criticism from those who believed that Alabama, Ole Miss or South Carolina was more deserving of the final at-large bid.
Changing the championship game format based on this one instance, especially with such a radical idea, would be a knee-jerk reaction.
And knee-jerk reactions usually end up creating more problems than they solve.
Especially in this case.
The championship game format wouldn’t be an issue right now had Miami not blown a 3-touchdown lead and lost its regular-season finale to Syracuse. A Hurricanes victory would have all but guaranteed both them and SMU spots in the Playoff regardless of who won in Charlotte.
It was only when 3-loss Clemson snuck into the ACC title game that things got complicated.
There’s no guarantee a similar situation will happen next year. In fact, the opposite scenario could take place, One similar to that of the Big 12 this season, in which several teams tie for the league lead with 2 losses, with only the championship game winner earning an automatic Playoff bid.
Then what?
“The conference championship games are important, as long as we make them important, right?” Phillips said. “Depending on how you treat the conference champions or that championship game, you may want to do it differently.”
Loosely translated, the commissioner is hinting that the format could be altered on the fly from year to year to try and adjust to specific situations.
Or play the system.
Either way, it’s a bad idea. Though nowhere near as bad as the original concept of “parking” the league’s best team so that 2 others can decide the “championship.”
The ACC is already fighting a losing battle against the perception that it’s an also-ran conference. Turning its championship game into a consolation prize for teams finishing out of the money in the regular season in hopes one might sneak into the Playoff won’t do anything to change that narrative.
It will simply validate it.
Award-winning columnist Brett Friedlander has covered the ACC and college basketball since the 1980s.