The newness provided an unexpected promise for the upcoming start of training camp season, and the lively discussion generated furtive looks capable of bridging the gap from last season’s chaotic and wild run to a College Football Playoff championship. For the first time since 2019, an ACC representative played in the final game after Miami advanced to a virtual home game against top-ranked Indiana, and the heraldry and pageantry completed a year in which change forever altered the sport’s overall landscape. But even with another year preparing to begin, a required reading about how much college football is going to once again shift its landscape popped throughout the offseason.
So before any conversation about the upcoming season begins, it’s worth revisiting some of the highlighted differences at the national, the ACC, and the local Boston College level:
National: The Pac-12 is so back.
The league once nicknamed the “Conference of Champions” broke apart in the sudden aftermath of the 2023 season. It had already lost USC and UCLA to the Big Ten as part of the midwest-based unit’s further expansion to the West Coast, but Oregon and Washington joined them after earning their way to the final Pac-12 Conference Championship in Las Vegas before Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah departed for the Big 12. Cal and Stanford subsequently found a home in the ACC, which in turn left Oregon State and Washington State alone in a two-team league facing an uncertain future.
Two years later, a scheduling arrangement with the Mountain West Conference ultimately led to the creation of a new Pac-12 with the additions of Boise State, Fresno State, San Diego State and Utah State. Texas State then left the Sun Belt Conference to become the eighth team required to maintain full league status, and Gonzaga, which doesn’t sponsor football, ultimately joined as a ninth program for the remainder of sports.
National: Fallout from After Dark
As expected, the Pac-12’s rebuild led the Mountain West to reconstitute its own league around its remaining membership at Air Force, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, San Jose State, UNLV and Wyoming. Within that replacement effort, the addition of UTEP from Conference USA maintained an eight-team membership, but FCS powerhouse North Dakota State and Mid-American Conference staple Northern Illinois found a new home for their football programs. Outside of football, the Huskies moved to the Horizon League, but the Bison remained in the Summit League for non-gridiron sports.
Louisiana Tech subsequently joined the Sun Belt after leaving Conference USA while the MAC added Sacramento State from the FCS-level Missouri Valley Football Conference – the same league that produced North Dakota State.
National: The New New College Football Playoff
The second year of the 12-team College Football Playoff produced thrilling highlights and moments during the sport’s postseason run to Indiana’s 27-21 win over Miami in South Florida’s national championship game, but the earlier debate around qualification resumes left a larger conversation about how to further refine a process that triggered water cooler conversations across the nation. Despite making the final game, Miami hadn’t played for the ACC championship, so the wild fourth quarter against the Hoosiers understandably required a down-ballot look at how to move the process out of its relative infancy.
The result is an altered process designed to avoid some of the sticky situations from last year’s elections, and for the first time, the conference champions from each of the Power Four leagues – the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and SEC – receive automatic bids regardless of their final ranking status. An automatic bid is then reserved for the best Group of Six team regardless of its conference championship status. From the independents, Notre Dame receives an automatic berth if it finishes inside of the CFP’s top-12 with the at-large teams coming from the remaining ranked programs. Once the field is set, the top four teams automatically receive first round byes.
This replaces the previous method of qualifying the five highest-ranked conference champions regardless of their league with the four top-ranked conference champions receiving the first round bye. Remaining teams once again play on campus sites in the first round with the semifinal games rotating through the Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Fiesta Bowl and Peach Bowl.
Conference: What that means for the ACC.
Automatically including the Power Four conference champions in the field ensures that last year won’t repeat itself after Duke’s 27-20 win over Virginia resulted in the Blue Devils missing the tournament despite winning their first outright conference championship since John F. Kennedy’s presidency. Right up until the moment when Chad Morris threw an interception into masked double coverage, the No. 12-ranked Miami Hurricanes were effectively out of the field despite going 10-2 on the season while Virginia was one of the five-best conference champions, but the loss knocked both the conference champion and No. 10 Notre Dame right out of the tournament selection process.
Duke’s spot in the game ultimately occurred because of a complex set of tiebreaker scenarios among the five teams that finished the season with two ACC losses. The Cavaliers were already in the ACC Championship as the league’s regular season champion, but they hadn’t played Miami, Georgia Tech, SMU or Pittsburgh during the regular season, so the teams with two league losses were left to figure out which one belonged on the opposite sidelines. Duke went 0-2 against that group, but Pitt beat Georgia Tech while losing to Miami and SMU’s one game against those programs was a win over Miami. In the end, the criteria wound up defaulting to each team’s strength of schedule, which meant Duke was anchored by the game against Virginia – regardless of the outcome.
In an attempt to avoid history from repeating itself, commissioner Jim Phillips announced during the ACC Kickoff that the conference would instead use the Team Success Ranking by SportSource Analytics to separate its programs based on their body of work. The data-driven poll is already a large piece of the CFP selection committee’s process for determining a body of work, so it made sense to incorporate and streamline the conference behind a similar formula.
“You have to do everything you can to position your championship game with those two best teams,” admitted Phillips during the ACC Kickoff. “Head-to-head matters. That’s always most important. Then we will look at the grouping and how teams fared. It will come down to body of work. I’m looking forward to that.”
Conference: More bowls, more fun.
The College Football Playoff understandably remains a goal for all ACC teams, but remaining teams with bowl eligibility will find themselves in a revamped Bowl Season with new destinations within the conference landscape. Given the league’s expanded footprint and the ongoing debate surrounding the old Pac-12’s agreement to allot its former teams to the league’s old bowl lineup, the ACC has nearly 20 games that are at the league’s disposal for new matchups and destinations against teams from the SEC, the American, the Big Ten, the Big 12 and either the current or former Pac-12, as long as those former league teams don’t include Stanford or Cal.
The Boston College perspective is therefore difficult to ignore for a program that doesn’t normally move west of the Mississippi River. Removing the infamous First Responder Bowl in 2018 and the 2021 Military Bowl that was canceled due to COVID-19 leaves BC with three trips to the Pinstripe Bowl over the past 12 years with an additional “home” game in the Fenway Bowl and separate games in Detroit, Michigan and Birmingham, Alabama. The 2010 AdvoCare V100 Bowl (aka the Independence Bowl) was furthest west in Shreveport, Louisiana, and it’s been 15 and 16 years since the consecutive trips to the Emerald Bowl and Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl hosted at AT&T Park in San Francisco, California.
None of these bowls are independently net negative for the program, but a possible return to eligibility with six wins offers fun and intriguing conversations if the Eagles are able to claw their way into the debate and beyond.
Local: Eight-Nine is the new Six-Seven.
The ACC’s decision to transition to a hybrid scheduling model created several different quirks for the 2026 season, and while moving its 17 teams to a nine-game league slate aligns with the majority of college football power leagues, its odd-numbered grouping ensured that nothing could cleanly work for the immediate future. As part of its implementation, the 2026 season more specifically features 12 teams with nine league games while five teams, including Boston College, have an eight-game conference slate because of their previous non-conference contracts.
Beginning next year, the league will fully standardize its nine-game schedule with the exception of a one-team rotation that will annually play eight league games with a second Power Four non-conference game. In each circumstance, every team must still schedule a minimum of one non-conference game against a power conference team or Notre Dame.
Ironically, playing the eight-game league schedule for the upcoming season contributed to a wrinkle where Boston College is the only team in the bowl subdivision to schedule every game against power conference opponents. Understanding how a previously-scheduled game against Rutgers and a semi-annual rotation against Notre Dame satisfied the ACC’s one-game non-conference power opponent, Cincinnati was placed on the 2026 schedule while the Bearcats were in the American, but their decision to join the Big 12 in 2024 created a situation where all three of BC’s FBS non-conference opponents were considered power opponents.
A game against Maine remained BC’s FCS-level game for the upcoming season, but the strength of schedule unquestionably jumped after Cincinnati opened last season with a 7-1 record, a victory over No. 14 Iowa State and an appearance in the top-25. Four straight losses to end the season subsequently ended the team’s path to the conference championship, but an appearance in the Liberty Bowl marked the team’s first postseason game since the Luke Fickell era.
In a world where strength of schedule and full body of work is now an entrenched part of the discussion, 11 power conference opponents and games against Northeast-based teams from the Big 12 and the Big East are enough to keep BC in certain conversations if early weeks break appropriately. As always, a game against Notre Dame lurks alongside the rest of the ACC.
