Exclusive: ACC commissioner talks CFP, Belichick and the Duke doomsday scenario
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- ACC title game in Charlotte will be played Saturday between Virginia and Duke.
- If Duke wins, ACC will be at risk for not getting a single team in 12-team CFP playoffs.
- ACC commissioner Jim Phillips speaks about prop bets, Bill Belichick and state of league.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips has been on the job for close to five years now, and while his 12th-floor office view in uptown Charlotte is sweeping, so are the never-ending challenges and controversies of college athletics.
Phillips can see down into Bank of America Stadium from that office, and it’s inside that venue that the ACC will stage its 21st football championship game at 8 p.m. Saturday night (ABC) between Virginia and Duke. That game will bring an estimated $30 million economic impact to the Charlotte area, but is itself controversial.
While 10-2 Virginia clearly earned its spot in the title game with a 7-1 league record that led the ACC, Duke was part of a five-way tie at 6-2 for second place in the conference. Despite having the worst overall record of those five schools at 7-5, Duke somehow triumphed in a Byzantine tiebreaker system that’s harder to explain than calculus.
In any event, if Virginia (No. 17 in the CFP rankings) wins — and the Cavaliers already beat Duke 34-17 in November — it will be an 11-2 team. That would almost guarantee the Cavaliers a spot in the 12-team College Football Playoff as a decently ranked conference champion.
But if Duke upsets Virginia, there’s a legitimate chance an 8-5 Blue Devils team — and the entire ACC — would be left out of the CFP, replaced by two mid-major conference champions. That omission would give the conference a national black eye.
The mid-major conference champions in the best position to jump Duke in the “Duke wins” scenario would be the American champion (either No. 20 Tulane or No. 24 North Texas) and the Sun Belt champion — assuming 11-1 James Madison, which debuted at No. 25 in Tuesday’s penultimate CFP Top 25, beats Troy. Duke did not make the top 25 in the current CFP rankings.
Phillips and I met in his office Tuesday for a wide-ranging interview that included his thoughts on the “Duke Doomsday Scenario,” as some in the media have termed it, as well as the ACC’s strengthening connections to Charlotte, the future prognosis for UNC football coach Bill Belichick, and the issues raised by gambling on college sports.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Scott Fowler: Let’s start with this: If Duke wins Saturday night, should the Blue Devils make the CFP?
Jim Phillips: Whoever wins is in the CFP. To me, it’s very clear.
SF: And why is that?
JP: First of all, we’ve had a very good football season. Virginia earned the right to be here. They’re 7-1. They’re 10-2 overall. They’ve had a great year. We ended up having five teams go 6-2, and those are all very good teams.… At the end of the day, it was the seventh point of the tiebreaker that meant Duke had earned their way into the game….
Virginia (with a win) will be a top-15 team and an automatic qualifier…. Duke (with a win) will have won seven P4 (Power 4 conference) games. I think the teams that people are looking at right now could have zero wins against Power 4 teams. The strength of schedule, which is really important — I think it’s separated by 75 places in a 136-team comparison. They (Duke, with a victory) should get an opportunity to play in the CFP. They would be our ACC champion.
SF: The other ACC longshot option for a CFP berth is Miami, a 10-2 team that didn’t make the conference championship game yet is ranked higher than any other ACC team (No. 12 in current CFP).
JP: They’re 10-2. They have four wins against top 25 teams… They should be in as an at-large bid.
SF: What will attendance be like Saturday night in Charlotte for a game few saw coming?
JP: I feel good about our attendance. I really do. This is a game that you market and sell all year, regardless of who plays. If you just look at the history, no one should be surprised, because it seems like every year we have different teams… We’ve averaged around 63,000 (in championship games played at Bank of America Stadium in non-COVID seasons).... The economic impact has been estimated at about $30 million on average. And that’s important, because Charlotte is our home.
I don’t foresee any difference in this game to some of the years past. It’s the ACC championship game, and that matters to a lot of people. (Individual tickets remain available and start at $65 for the championship game, which isn’t expected to be a sellout).
SF: How would you assess the ACC’s connection with Charlotte now that you have been headquartered in the city for several years after the move from Greensboro?
JP: It’s been even better than I thought it would be…. The international airport is so important, and this (move to Charlotte) was before we even expanded to Cal, Stanford and SMU… We’ve played some international games. We’re gonna play (a football game) in Brazil next year. We played in Ireland last year… Corporate sponsorships have been outrageously good — we’ve hit an all-time high.
And probably most importantly, the recruitment and retention of talent. Charlotte is a place where people want to work, and want to live and raise a family…. We’ll also have the ACC men’s basketball tournament here again in March (2026), as well as many other conference championships to come… I feel very good that our conference is healthy.
SF: You’ve spoken about the need to keep innovating as a league. One of the things the ACC has done that I’ve loved, purely as a fan, is showing the inner workings of the ACC replay center in real time for select ACC football games. Will this technology be available and used in Saturday’s ACC championship?
JP: Yes. It will be used for the championship game and you will see it on TV. The replay center really has been terrific. State of the art. It has brought enormous clarity and transparency to how those replays are looked at and assessed…. I would really encourage other leagues to do the same thing. If you have the resources to do it, you should do it. The feedback has been incredible.
SF: Any chance we will see that for basketball?
JP: We have not done that.
SF: How about expanding it in football for 2026?
JP: I’d like to do it a little more in football next year (generally, only one ACC game had the replay center on live per week in 2025). That will be based some on staffing, but maybe (on a football game Saturday) you could do one in the early window, one in the mid(day) window and maybe one in the evening window.
SF: The league now has 18 schools (Notre Dame is an ACC member for every sport except football). Do you think the ACC will have to expand again?
JP: I don’t know. It’s a good question. I don’t think anybody’s sure. What we need to do right now, over the course of the next 4-6 years, is settle down the enterprise called college sports. We went through a new governance structure at the NCAA. We’ve gone through revenue sharing for the first time, with payment to players. We’re working in Washington, D.C., on some national legislation… We have a lot of things right now that we have to get settled to make this a sustainable model that works well into the future.
We can’t lose sight that there are 550,000 young people playing sports across all divisions, that have access and affordability to higher education through sport, and that we believe have life-changing experiences. And 99% of them, they’re not going professional.
SF: Sports gambling is now legal in much of the country, including North Carolina. What do you think about the recent headlines about gambling scandals in sports, particularly concerning prop bets in college sports?
JP: We have to eliminate the prop betting.
You’ve seen that most recently in Major League Baseball, those pitchers throwing balls in the dirt because there’s a prop bet about the first pitch to this person at the top of the seventh inning (and whether it will be a ball or a strike). Anything that undermines the integrity of the game will severely hurt sports, now and in the future…. I think we have to start with the prop betting, and stop it in the areas that our student athletes are most vulnerable.
SF: Last question: UNC took a huge swing hiring Bill Belichick as its football coach this year. The move certainly made a lot of headlines, but most of them weren’t good, and the Tar Heels finished 4-8. What have you thought of the Belichick experiment?
JP: I’m excited about the future of North Carolina football. I am. I think it was a difficult situation, a transition period, and you have the all-time winningest football coach and one of the greatest coaches in the game. He deserves time. He deserves support. And I think he’s got a really good plan moving forward.
