ACC's Jim Phillips explains new football tiebreaker, backs 24-team CFP

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The ACC revised its tiebreaker rules for determining conference championship game participants, commissioner Jim Phillips announced during the ACC Kickoff on Wednesday, July 15.

According to a news release from the ACC, the three "guiding principles" will be:

• 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.

When asked how the strongest body of work will be determined, Phillips said the conference will use Sports Source Analytics, which is what the College Football Playoff committee uses, to determine each team's success rankings.

"Who you play, when you play, the games that you win, nonconference as well as conference, will matter. That's a major change in college sports and certainly for the ACC," Phillips said, adding that 10,000 different season outcomes were evaluated by the league's athletic directors during a data-driven review. "We'll continue to watch how this thing goes. But I feel incredibly strong that we have gotten to the right place with unanimity from our membership on what this new tiebreaking policy states."

The ACC is transitioning to a nine-game conference schedule, with 12 of its 17 football members playing nine league games while five teams play eight conference contests in 2026. Starting in 2027, only one team each season will play eight ACC games; that team will be required to schedule two nonconference Power Four opponents compared to one for its contemporaries.

Louisville has only made the ACC championship game once, in 2023, head coach Jeff Brohm's first season. The Cardinals lost to Florida State, 16-6.

Last year, Duke, which had five regular-season losses, beat Virginia for the conference crown. Neither team was included in the College Football Playoff field; Miami was the conference's sole representative. The Hurricanes made the national championship game before falling to undefeated Indiana.

"What's changed this year is that there's an AQ (automatic qualifier) 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."

Here are other takeaways from Phillips' commissioner forum:

Phillips continues to back Protect College Sports Act

Phillips reiterated his support for the Protect College Sports Act, saying it "represents the best chance for Congress to assist college sports and address some of the major issues that plague it in the near term."

He added: "I don't agree that it's going to limit wages. What we want is more transparency about what's happening. We want those deals, whether names are attached or not, we want those to be transparent. We want agent registration because student-athletes are being taken advantage of. There's been nobody that's been more supportive of that, I think, than the ACC has been. So we're working with the senators involved; we're working with our historically black colleges and commissioners across the board because that can't be the outcome. ... That's not the goal of the Protect College Sports Act. It's a chance to stabilize the future of college athletics."

When asked about a contingency plan if the law doesn't pass, he said: "I don't know that I could share, you know, what does that look like beyond if we're not able to get some help there because I don't think anybody wants to go in that direction just yet. Because we are, truthfully, working as hard as we can to make this thing work. I don't know how much more disrupted college sports could be, but we would enter that ecosystem if we can't get something done."

Phillips calls NCAA's new 5-for-5 rule "really fair"

The NCAA now grants student-athletes up to five years of eligibility if they're enrolled in college no later than their 19th birthday, essentially ridding college sports of redshirt seasons. Phillips added that while some exceptions come into place like religious obligations, pregnancy and military duty, among other things, having five years of eligibility is fair and attractive to student-athletes.

"Why would you not want to wait around a little bit and stay in school a little bit longer?" Phillips questioned. "If you can get another degree — an undergraduate degree and a master's, and have it paid for — have all of the services that you could ever want at a particular school. Unlike any time in their life — no matter how rich they are or successful they are, they'll never have 500 people in an athletic department willing to do anything for them. And they're able to make some money. That's a good thing. Why would you want to leave? But what it's unfair to is the group of student-athletes that are trying to access higher education, i.e., high school students. So you have to have some common sense to this thing. It can't be a situation where a student-athlete comes in and they have an unlimited amount of time."

Phillips in favor of 24-team College Football Playoff

Phillips believes the College Football Playoff should expand to 24 teams, calling the potential expansion "the right number for us," though questions about what that would mean for the regular season and when it would start have yet to be answered.

"What we've asked the CFP to do — when I say 'we,' I'm talking about all of the commissioners and Pete Bevacqua at Notre Dame, the 11 individuals in that room — is for our consultants to look at: What is the value of those additional games? When could we play those additional games?" Phillips said. "We're waiting for some of those answers back. We have the ability to make a change — not for this upcoming year; it will stay at 12. But if we're going to make a change for the 2027 College Football National Championship Playoff, that will have to take place by Dec. 1 of 2026.

"Again, I do feel like there's good momentum, and there's good support. You have to do things in a collaborative way. You can't force anything down anyone. I really have tried to have a career built on that. We're working collaboratively, but there's certainly a lot of momentum about expanding the Playoff."

Reach Louisville football, women's basketball and baseball beat writer Alexis Cubit at acubit@gannett.com and follow her on X at @Alexis_Cubit. 

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: ACC's Jim Phillips explains new football tiebreaker, backs 24-team CFP