CHARLOTTE — Dabo Swinney says he does not care about any tiebreakers when it comes to deciding who plays for an ACC Championship. He just wants to win.

However, winning alone might not be enough for his Clemson team to get into the ACC Championship Game.

On Wednesday, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips announced the league’s new tiebreaker policies now that the league has 12 teams playing nine conference games and five teams playing eight games inside the league.

The updated tiebreaking procedure is built on three guiding principles: 

• Head-to-head results will always matter most. 
• No team will be overly rewarded or penalized based on the number of conference games it played. 
• When head-to-head competition cannot separate tied teams, the team with the strongest overall body of work will earn the opportunity to compete for the ACC Championship and the conference’s automatic qualifier to the College Football Playoff. 

The goal in all of those – two get the two best teams in the league to play for a championship, which a lot of people can say did not happen in last year’s ACC Championship Game when 7-5 Duke beat 10-2 Virginia.

The Blue Devils won a five-way tiebreaker to get into the championship game thanks to claiming the conference’s highest combined opponent winning percentage in the old tiebreaker rules. Duke advanced to the championship game because their conference opponents posted a combined 32-32 (.500) record.

Under the new tiebreakers, this should not happen.

“What’s changed this year is that there’s an AQ awarded for The Power Four conferences,” Phillips said. “So, you have to do everything you can to position your championship game with those two best teams.”

The ACC will be using Sports Source Analytics to help with any needed tiebreaker scenarios, the same analysis company the College Football Playoff uses to help pick its playoff field.

“Head-to-head matters,” Phillips said. “That’s always most important. Then we will look at the grouping and how teams fared in the regular conference season. It will come down to body of work.

“Who you play, when you play, the games you win, conference and non-conference will matter.”

That is right, who Clemson and others play in the non-conference part of the schedule could play a part in who plays in the ACC Championship Game.

“That’s a major change in college sports and certainly for the ACC,” Phillips said. “I’m looking forward to that.”

Phillips says the ACC used a lot of different consultants to come up with its new tiebreaker policies and did more than 10,000 algorithms of different scenarios.

“It warranted that kind of time and commitment, so that we can position ourselves to put those two best ACC teams forward,” Phillips said. “Our schedule’s not perfect coming up this year because we’re going into that transition period where we’re going to nine games, we have an uneven number of teams in the conference.

“Twelve of our schools will play nine conference games, five of our schools will play eight. Everyone will play ten Power Four games, so there’s some balance there. We’ll continue to watch how this thing goes. But I feel incredibly strong that we have gotten to the right place with unanimity with our membership on what this new tiebreaking policy states.”

–photo courtesy of ACC Communications