ACC: 2026 Football Championship Game will be the last after College Football Playoff expansion
By Google News Sports ·
As the College Football Playoff announced it would expand to 24 teams, several conferences, including the Atlantic Coast Conference, announced that this season would be their last time hosting a conference title game for football.
On Monday, the ACC announced that the 2026 ACC Football Championship Game, which will be held on Dec. 5 at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, will be the conference's last.
"For more than two decades, the ACC Football Championship Game has provided a national stage for the Conference’s student-athletes and programs while creating memorable moments for fans throughout the league," the conference said in a statement posted on its website.
"From Jacksonville, Tampa and Orlando to its longtime home in Charlotte, each host community has helped build the event into one of college football’s signature Championship Saturday traditions."
Duke Blue Devils head football coach Manny Diaz, whose team won the 2025 ACC title game, said that the decision was "inevitable at some point," but that he was in favor of some things not getting decided by committees and "make things decided on football fields."
However, Diaz said he wasn't sure how the conference would decide who would be the conference champion going forward in a "bloated conference."
"If you look at all across the country this year, everything's going to come down to some sort of, you know, tiebreaker, and we're going to be drawing lots to find out who the two teams are to begin with anyway," Diaz said.
The CFP's expansion on Monday made official a deal between ESPN and the CFP that had been in the works for months. The network reported it would pay an additional $1.7 billion over five years on top of the original $7.8 billion contract that runs through the 2031 season.
The new format will grant the Power Four conference champions automatic spots and give one more to the best team from the Group of Six. But that slot and the other 19 will be decided by a selection committee that will serve as the latest edition in college football's long history of polls and opinions having lasting impacts on teams' fates.
Diaz said he still believes the fairest approach to having a playoff is to play your way out of the conference.
"To determine the top teams in each conference, play your way out of your conference and then enter the playoff through playing out of your conference. But we're ways away from that," Diaz said.
ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said that while the conference title game has been an "important and meaningful part" of the conference's history, the expansion of the CFP would create more opportunities for student-athletes, programs and fan bases to compete for a national title.
"As we look ahead, the expanded College Football Playoff presents an exciting new chapter for college football and additional opportunities for ACC programs to compete on the sport’s biggest stage,” said Phillips, who is also on the College Football Playoff Management Committee.
Statement from Commissioner Jim Phillips, Ph.D., on the College Football Playoff’s expansion to 24 teams. https://t.co/HUcSCi7zRL
The conference said it would work with the 17 other football programs in the conference, the CFP and "other key stakeholders" to decide the future process of determining its conference champion and automatic qualifier.
The ACC said it would share additional details as it gets them.
WRAL Sports' Brian Murphy & Chris Lea, and the Associated Press contributed to this…
Originally published by Google News Sports
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