CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — SMU coach Rhett Lashlee went out of his way Friday to congratulate Duke on winning the 2025 Atlantic Coast Conference championship, adding that the Blue Devils should have made the College Football Playoff over Sun Belt champion James Madison.
“I think we all know they should have easily been in the playoff," Lashlee said. "When you win the ACC, the way they did and who they beat, they should have been in instead of a team from the Sun Belt. But hopefully things get learned and that doesn’t happen again. We should have been a two-bid league."
Duke beat No. 20 Virginia 27-20 in overtime for the ACC title last December after winning a five-team tiebreaker to qualify.
The ACC spent the week leading up to the title game campaigning for then-No. 10 ranked Miami to get into the playoffs by virtue of a head-to-head win against Notre Dame, along with Duke-Virginia winner.
Miami and JMU got in; Duke and Notre Dame did not.
Duke was the only Power Four champion to miss the 12-team playoff, something that still irks Blue Devils coach Manny Diaz eight months later.
“We’re all here because 17 teams are entering into a competition to determine who this champion is,” Diaz said at the ACC Kickoff in Charlotte, North Carolina. “In my mind, whoever wins that competition should always be in the College Football Playoff. And by the rules that everyone agreed to ... we won the competition. So therefore, we should have gone to the playoff."
ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips announced this week the league is changing its tiebreaker format by using the SportSource Analytics metric. Under the new format, Miami would have won the 2025 tiebreaker and played in the ACC title game over Duke.
Diaz said that doesn't really matter when it comes to last season.
“The story shouldn’t be about the tiebreaker creating more deserving teams. The story should have been that last year the ACC deserved to have Duke and Miami in,” Diaz said. “It’s a respect thing for our league."
Diaz said the problem still comes down to what he called “a fashion show or a beauty pageant.”
“I don’t like tiebreakers that still use the beauty pageant,” Diaz said. "We absolutely deserved to be there because of all the teams that won six games — and we weren’t great at everything last year — but one thing we were pretty good at was winning ACC games. And we won six, and everyone else that won six didn’t play as good of teams as we did.”
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AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football
