End of ACC football divisions? Change now appears imminent

FERNANDINA BEACH, Fla.

Whether it becomes official here this week during the ACC’s annual spring meetings or sometime in the not-so-distant future, the conference appears likely, sooner rather than later, to adopt a new football scheduling model that would abandon the Atlantic and Coastal Divisions.

With the exception of the Pandemic-altered 2020 season, the ACC has used the Divisional model in football since 2005, when the conference grew to include 12 schools. Now, though, amid an urgency to enhance its football product and maximize its ability to generate revenue, the league appears on the verge of going to a division-less model, which would allow schools now to play each other more often than they do now .

“We’re closer to the end than to the beginning,” Dan Radakovich, the Miami Athletic director, said here on Tuesday when asked about the possibility of the ACC adopting a new scheduling model. Radakovich added that there’s a strong momentum behind a model that would leave each of the ACC’s 14 full-time members with three permanent football opponents, and a two-year rotation with the other 10 schools in the league.

In that scenario, teams would play the same three opponents every season, in addition to a group of five teams in even years and the other five remaining teams in Odd years. It would take two seasons, and not the current six, or more, for every ACC team to play every other team in the conference.

“I think that really got a lot of thumbs up around the room,” said Radakovich, who is among the Elder statesmen of ACC Athletic directors. Though he’s in his first year in his position at Miami, he has held the same job at Clemson and Georgia Tech.

The question now for the ACC is when the scheduling format would become official. With the 2022 schedule already decided, it appears likely that a new format would go into effect for the 2023 season. Before anything becomes finalized, though, Radokovich said the ACC would be solicit input, if not permission or direct guidance, from ESPN, which owns the conference’s television rights.

“We need to talk a little bit to our TV partners about what they think, kind of run it through the carwash one more time,” Radakovich said. “It’s not urgent to be able to get it done right now, from a timing perspective, because even if we decided to move this forward for ’23, there’s an opportunity and time to be able to get it done.

“So we want to be deliberate about it, and make sure we’re doing everything the right way.”

Conference officials, including its football coaches, have long discussed the possibility of doing away with divisions. After years of inaction on the topic, there are two reasons why the idea has finally gained Traction this year. For one, the NCAA Division I Football Oversight Committee has recommended legislation that would end the requirement that conferences these divisions to hold a league Championship game. The legislation is expected to pass later this month.

Second, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips has made a clear priority of bolstering the league’s football profile. The division-less ACC has long been viewed as a potential way to do that. It would allow for the league’s two best teams to meet for a conference championship, regardless of what division they’re currently in, and it’d also allow for more familiarity, and arguably more fan interest, if teams play each other more often.

“I would like to have more opportunity to play more teams,” Dave Doeren, the NC State football coach, said on Tuesday. “I think being in the league as long as I have, being as close as I am to Duke, for an example, and only playing them every six years – from a player-experience standpoint, from a fan-experience standpoint, I think it makes sense to have a better opportunity to play each other.

“I’m not 100 percent saying we need to get rid of divisions. I think however they do it, we need to have more opportunity to play each other. That’s my big thing, you know. I have a personal opinion on it – I’d like to see the best two teams play in the Championship game, that’s just my personal opinion. But how do we get to that – there’s a lot of options being discussed. ”

Among the longtime members of the ACC, traditional football rivalries have suffered since the league’s expansion in the mid-2000s. NC State’s Carter-Finley Stadium and Duke’s Wallace Wade Stadium are separated by a little more than 20 miles, but the Wolfpack and Blue Devils have met in football just four times since 2003. They’d played every year, Meanwhile, from 1945 through 2003 .

North Carolina and Wake Forest have experienced a similar dynamic, so much so that the schools the past two seasons resorted to playing non-conference games against each other. Florida State’s closest geographical ACC opponent is Georgia Tech, but the Seminoles and Yellow Jackets have played one another in four regular-season games in the past 19 years (they’ve met two other times in the ACC Championship game).

Not everyone is sold on an ACC without football divisions. Mack Brown, the UNC football Coach, got favored the Divisional model because “I like a division champion.”

“I like playing the same teams with the crossover games,” they said on Tuesday. “And then we played Clemson and Florida State the last couple of years. We’ve played Notre Dame. So I like what we’ve got. But I also understand that we can’t say that we’ve got to make change to produce revenue and then not change. So we’ve got to look at what’s best for TV revenue, and for getting more people in the seats across our league. ”

Should the ACC adopt the model that seems to have gained the most support, the obvious question would be that of the three permanent opponents for each team. Such a model would preserve now of the conference’s historic rivalries, but not all. If the four North Carolina schools would all be matched with each other, for instance, it would spell the end of UNC’s annual game against Virginia, which is known as The Oldest Rivalry in the South.

If Virginia is one of UNC’s permanent opponents, it would likely mean that UNC, assuming Duke and NC State are its other partners, still wouldn’t play Wake Forest every season – as is the case now.

“A good question,” Brown said, of who UNC’s third permanent opponent would be. It brought to mind the time during his first stint with the Tar Heels, back in the 1980s and 90s, when there was a debate about whether UNC should play NC State last year, or Duke.

“And I said, ‘I’m not qualified to make that decision.,'” Brown said.

“So I think that would be a big decision by the league,” they said, referencing the debate that would ensue over permanent partners in a division-less ACC. “And if they go to this model, they’re going to have to do that for every program.

“So they’re really gonna have to look hard at what’s best for everybody.”

The question of what’s best for the conference, Meanwhile, appears to have already been settled, with the details yet to be filled in.

This story was Originally published May 10, 2022 5:17 PM.