​The ACC announced new football tiebreaker rules Wednesday, July 15 after last year’s conundrum nearly left the conference out of the College Football Playoff. The moves aim to assure that 7-5 Duke will no longer play in the ACC championship over 10-2 Miami.That nightmare scenario came into being in 2025 amid a six-team tangle atop the ACC standings heading into the last week of the regular season. Miami’s two conference losses to Louisville and SMU put the Hurricanes into a five-way tie for second place in the final standings. But despite a 10-2 overall record and the CFP rankings listing them as the No. 12 team in the country, they had to watch a Duke team with three more losses play in — and win — the ACC championship game against Virginia.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThis left the ACC without an automatic bid in the 12-team playoff because the five-loss Blue Devils would not be ranked above fellow conference champions James Madison from the Sun Belt and Tulane from the American Conference. Luckily, the committee gave Miami the final at-large berth, which the Hurricanes used to run all the way to the national championship game. But the ACC knew it had to adapt its championship qualifications to avoid another quagmire down the road.The conference said its evaluation process included more than 10,000 simulated season outcomes to reach its new policy. While head-to-head results remain the most important factors, the ACC moved the tied teams’ rankings up from the No. 6 tiebreaker to No. 2 in the list. The conference will continue to use the Team Success Rating from SportSource Analytics, one of the measuring tools used by the CFP committee.Teams that are tied for a spot in the ACC championship no longer have to worry about common opponents or the record of common conference opponents, as was the case last year. That’s what did the Hurricanes in: Duke’s ACC foes had a combined win percentage of .500, while Miami and Georgia Tech came in behind them at .438.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe ACC is using conference win percentage instead of wins and losses because not every team will play the same amount of conference games. This year marks a transition toward a nine-game conference schedule, but because of prior commitments, five teams — Florida State, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Boston College and North Carolina — will still play eight ACC games in 2026. And because the ACC has 17 football members, one team each year will play an eight-game schedule starting in 2027.The ACC said its updated tiebreaker policy “was developed to reward head-to-head results, account for the league’s teams playing an alternate number of conference games, while also identifying the two most deserving teams to compete for the ACC Football Championship and the conference’s automatic berth into the College Football Playoff.”Here’s a look at the new ACC football tiebreaker policy, as laid out on the ACC website:AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementDefi