ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips touts ‘access’ to football playoffs at league meeting

After sending just one team — Miami — to the 12-team College Football Playoff field last season, ACC coaches and administrators arrived at this week’s spring meetings with a clear priority: access.

At the close of this week’s spring meetings, held at The Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said the league’s coaches and athletic directors are aligned in supporting a 24-team College Football Playoff — a model that would double the current field and dramatically reshape the sport’s structure.

“I’ve been very consistent in what I’ve indicated to this group,” Phillips said Wednesday, “and that is, when you’re leaving national championship contending teams out of the playoff, you don’t have the right number.”

Undefeated Florida State was left out of the College Football Playoff in 2023, when the field was just four teams. Phillips brought up this example, and the fact that Notre Dame was left out of the playoff this past year despite being “CFP-worthy” in his mind.

“There is so much investment going on in the sport of football and in college athletics,” Phillips said. “And I’m not necessarily concerned about schools that have traditionally found their way to the college football playoff. I’m talking about those that would have a chance (to win) that, right now, don’t have a chance to get into that playoff. I think that’s about access.”

And in an era where access increasingly equals relevance, the ACC is throwing its support behind a bigger field.

The push for expansion comes as the league has seen limited national championship success in its revenue sports. The ACC hasn’t won a national title in football since 2018 or in men’s basketball since 2019. That drought represents the league’s longest combined title gap in those two sports since the 1990s and has fueled urgency and restlessness inside the league office.

Phillips said Wednesday he was particularly proud of the recent step forward for ACC men’s basketball. The conference doubled its number of NCAA Tournament bids from four to eight last year thanks to improved nonconference success. For Phillips, it’s an indication that the ACC’s “key change” of shortening its conference slate from 20 to 18 games worked. The recent announcement of March Madness expansion to a 76 team field will only boost the ACC’s chances of dancing.

And thus, the focus of the conference returns to football postseason access — where the stakes, financial implications and impact on the calendar are significantly greater.

The question of the calendar

“Among the coaches, I would say the biggest concerns are the calendar,” ACC senior vice president of football Michael Strickland said. “When do we start the season? How many open dates do we need or want? When does the playoffs start? And then when does it finish?”

Under the current model, the college football season is pushing deeper into January than ever before. For coaches, that’s not just inconvenient. It’s unsustainable.

“It goes well into January recruiting,” Strickland said. “It comes up almost straight up to February 1, which is the dead period … and then you’ve got spring recruiting. So the overlap, that creep, that’s a major issue that needs to be resolved.”

For programs across the Triangle — including UNC, N.C. State and Duke — those calendar pressures are already shaping how rosters are built and maintained.

Wolfpack coach Dave Doeren put it more bluntly.

“We can’t start Week 0 and finish at the end of January and think we’re doing what’s best for our athletes health-wise,” Doeren said. “We have to figure out how to make our season make sense and have a playoff. So that was part of the conversation — that we are in favor of expansion for all those reasons, and it needs to be coupled with our calendar being revised in a smart way.”

That tension appears central to the ACC’s position on CFP expansion. A larger playoff may create more access, but without significant calendar changes, it risks compounding the issues coaches are already navigating.

This is part of the reason SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has been adamant in his support for a 16-team playoff, as opposed to a 24-team field.

“We’re open to the conversation,” Sankey said Monday during the APSE Southeast Region meeting at the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in Birmingham, “but there are a lot of ideas out there that have to be supported with analysis and information, not speculation, on something as important as a regular season in college football.

“Hey, if you can build the regular season and build the postseason through expansion in a different way, awesome. Let’s get to it. But let’s understand that.”

Expansion could reshape — or remove — conference championship

One of the clearest ripple effects of a 24-team playoff would come in early December.

As the field grows, the need and desire for conference championship games shrink.

“Why are we taking the two most successful teams and putting them in peril?” Strickland said. “(There’s) risk of injury. Anything could happen in the championship game when they’re already in the field.”

That reality would have major implications for the ACC’s championship game in Charlotte, a fixture of the league’s football identity and a key revenue generator. While Strickland noted the league has flexibility within its existing agreements (and thus wouldn’t face contractual hurdles should the ACC title game go kaput) the broader question looms: What replaces that inventory if it disappears?

The answer, it seems, is the playoff itself.

‘Access is what teams want’

For ACC coaches, the push for 24 teams in the CFP is about staying relevant.

“Access is what teams want,” Doeren said. “So if you want to be a relevant team, you have to be a postseason team. Bowl games are what made you relevant before. Now the playoffs will be — if they expand moving forward.”

Under the current 12-team format, that path to relevancy is narrow. Miami was the ACC’s only representative last season, and the Hurricanes needed an at-large bid to get in.

A 24-team field would likely change that equation, creating more consistent access for leagues outside the sport’s two power centers: the SEC and Big Ten.

ACC officials also see potential upside in a larger playoff — not just in access, but in structure.

A redesigned format could allow the sport to reset its calendar: become a one-semester sport again, get the playoff back in December and still maximize New Year’s Day as a tent-pole day for college football.

It may also help address one of the sport’s growing contradictions — a postseason that overlaps with transfer-portal windows, recruiting periods and increasingly critical player movement.

For coaches like Duke’s Manny Diaz, that broad reset is long overdue.

“I think everybody understands our calendar is archaic,” Diaz said. “So to be able to update that, and get the feedback from the coaches … there’s nothing like getting everybody in a room together and have everybody express their opinions.”

Proposed changes extend beyond the game schedule.

At this week’s meetings, ACC coaches received a presentation on proposed changes to spring practice that would reshape the offseason. Under the model, programs would have access to 21 practices they could spread across several months. The flexibility would allow coaches to shift some on-field work (such as drills) into June and incorporate more OTA-style, non-contact sessions in July — a structure many see as a better fit for player development and recovery.

“I like doing more work, but I like doing it over a longer window of time, so I can have more recovery built in,” Doeren said. “Under the current model for (spring) training camp, you have 29 days to do 25 practices. That’s a lot of work in 29 days. So how about spreading that out over some more days?”

“Being able to play a little bit more on the field with those guys over a long period of time, I think, will help with the development and retention,” Doeren later added.

What does this mean back home?

For programs across North Carolina, the stakes are high.

A larger playoff could provide more realistic postseason paths for UNC, N.C. State and Duke — particularly in seasons where the ACC lacks a clear national title contender but features multiple competitive teams.

For now, the conference is still in evaluation mode.

There is a clear consensus in the ACC around a 24-team CFP model, but there is less clarity on how that model would be implemented — and who ultimately benefits.

The conference’s position, it seems, is a delicate one: advocate for expansion, push for access, and hope the final structure reflects both.

Because if the ACC doesn’t, the risk isn’t just falling behind.

It’s being left out altogether.

This story was originally published May 13, 2026 at 6:00 AM with the headline "ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips touts ‘access’ to football playoffs at league meeting."