Why SMU’s selection to College Football Playoff might save the ACC
Look at the pitiful ACC. No shame at all.
Celebrating Clemson and SMU in the College Football Playoff as a verifying and flag-planting moment for the conference on the verge of collapse.
Clemson, the ACC champion and automatic qualifier, is suing the ACC to leave the league.
SMU, the ACC’s at-large CFP selection, paid $200 million to get into the ACC, and was only allowed to join if it forfeited all media rights cash for nine years.
Nine years.
That’s right, SMU – which Sunday afternoon raised the profile of a dying conference by securing a precious at-large CFP bid over SEC heavyweight Alabama – is an unpaid intern for a decade.
SMU, which just added untold millions to the ACC’s coffers and will add more with every win in the playoff, is monetarily supplementing the other 15 teams in the league. And the ACC is trumpeting this from on all high.
That’s the story of this controversial day in college football — and all the tentacles that go with it. Not SMU’s questionable choice over Alabama, or Indiana’s layup to the way up and into the CFP.
Not why, with the sport barreling toward the NFL model, the CFP decided to stick with the college sports bracket model instead of reseeding the field after the first round — thus delivering No.1 Oregon the most difficult road among the four teams receiving first round byes.
This is about SMU legitimizing the ACC, and saving the league from its own inevitable undoing of falling further behind the SEC and Big Ten because of a poor product on the field.
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You want college football like it used to be (or always has been)? Thank a billionaire.
Thank one of the handful of SMU boosters that pooled together some pocket change to get the Mustangs into a power conference. Left for dead long ago with the dismantling of the old Southwest Conference, SMU reached out to the very people who earned them the NCAA’s big haircut in the 1980s to save themselves from drifting further into college football irrelevance.
Who could’ve known they’d take the ACC along with them in year 1?
‘It’s a couple hundred million dollars,’ SMU mega booster David Miller told Yahoo!, “I’m not losing sleep over it.”
Fat cat boosters are people, too, everyone.
But this is more than just another ACC team in the College Football Playoff. Because when the conference commissioners meet this offseason to discuss the format and financials of the new 2026 playoff contract, the Big Ten and SEC’s ability to demand more from the ACC and Big 12 or else has at least been slowed. Momentarily.
The SEC will use Alabama’s snub as an opportunity to declare it needs four (or more) automatic bids moving forward in a 14-team playoff. The Big Ten will do the same.
The only pushback for the ACC – which could lose both Clemson and the original disrupter, Florida State, to legal action – is the statement made by SMU in Year 1 as an ACC member.
A conference on the rise, the ACC will argue. When everyone is playing on a level field in 2025 with the $20 million salary cap, watch how the gap between the have and have nots shrinks.
Miami was the second team out in this year’s CFP, and if the projected 14-team format of 2026 were currently in play, the ACC would have three teams in the CFP. You want an all at-large field, as SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has floated? We’ll take it.
Why do I have a vision of Fredo, slobbering over himself, demanding respect from Michael Corleone, knowing it’s a futile ask?
‘I’m smart, and I want respect!’
If the ACC presidents were proactive, they’d use this power move by SMU as leverage against Florida State and Clemson. In other words, we had three teams in the top 14, and FSU — the one school with the greatest upside in the conference — lost 10 games in a rare step back.
This isn’t rocket science. Come up with a revenue sharing agreement that benefits the conference bluebloods, and give your conference a fighting chance to stay relevant.
If the rest of the conference doesn’t like that Florida State, Clemson, Miami and North Carolina are receiving more of the media rights pie, find a few sugar daddy boosters of your own and get better. Or you could be unpaid interns, too, in college football’s rapidly-changing environment.
And end up like Fredo.
Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB.