Two days from now, we'll finally know which 12 teams will be participating in the College Football Playoff. Tuesday's rankings gave us a pretty good idea of who most of those teams might be, but this weekend's conference championship games could throw the field into total disarray. Let's take a look at all of the title games with playoff implications (sorry, MAC and Conference USA) to explain how things could shake out.
ACC championship: No. 17 Virginia vs. Duke (8 p.m. ET Saturday on ABC)
We'll start at the end of the slate, because this is the game that could lead to total playoff chaos.
Cal's upset win over SMU last weekend led to a five-way tie for second place in the ACC. The conference was forced to go to the fifth tiebreaker (conference opponents' win percentage) to determine who would face Virginia in the title game in Charlotte. The answer was Duke, which had finished the regular season at 7–5.
The reason this matters is that the CFP format grants automatic bids to the five highest ranked conference champions. When that structure was established, it was envisioned as a way to have each of the four power conferences represented, along with one Group of 5 team. Now, it may mean the ACC gets left out in the cold. If Duke wins, it will not vault above any of the three Group of 5 contenders (No. 20 Tulane, No. 24 North Texas or No. 25 James Madison). In that scenario, we'd almost certainly get two G5 teams in the field.
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