ACC's Bold Idea for CFB Playoff

ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips says that they've got an idea

And the idea is their championship game might feature the second and third place teams of the conference

Wait, what? They're doing so because Rhett Lashley head coach at SMU was all worried that by playing in the ACC

title game and losing the Clemson, they'd unreasonably risked a spot in the college football playoff

And what the ACC wants to do, obviously, is not throw out their team that could lose a spot in the playoff by losing in the ACC championship game

And I believe this is actually going to be the future. I think this is actually a really smart idea

If you think about it, you have four automatic bids for conference champions

I don't think that's going to change as the format changes with the college football playoff

I think the seating will change, but automatic bids on the conference champions is going to stay in place

So what you do is you grant the regular season champion, your ACC champion bid

Okay, that's the automatic bid, right? And then what you do is you play two versus three second place versus third place Okay and you hope that that creates the at large bid so that one of those two get a quality victory

in the ACC postseason game enough to get you in. Okay. Now, you could do the other way

You could say the winner of the second and the third team of the conference gets the automatic bid

hoping that your best regular season team gets the at large. but my guess is a conference does not want to potentially sacrifice the regular season champion

not getting in because the committee says it wasn't that impressive of a resume

So what I think you want to do is reward the regular season champ, automatic bid

and then two versus three. So what you have with your conference championship games, the ACC, the SEC, the SEC, the Big 12, obviously, and the Big 10 are essentially playing games

that by virtue of winning those games, it's a two versus three

one of those at-larges is going to come out of that. So I think that's a smart play

I think it's the future. I'd be surprised with the ACC did not do it

And I think actually they'll be the first and the other conferences will follow suit

because what you don't want is teams locked up with bids that go, eh, we don't need to play your conference title game

because then it doesn't matter. You want it to feel like it's big and as drama

two versus three helps that out because then it's like a play in game