What Was the Deal Behind the ACC Bowl Fiasco?

Distance continues to grow between this past weekend and the present moment, with Florida State playoff arguments still crackling around the fringes but the upcoming playoff itself, and the bowls leading up to it, taking over the focus. One question remains, though:

What happened with the ACC?

Bowl selection usually takes a few hours after the playoff is announced, with most bowls and conferences knowing where their teams stand going into the day. The making of the decisions is usually a formality, and while there are surprises to us, the public, most of those come from arbitrary decisions between Group of Five schools and the shadowy nature of contracts between bowls and conferences. This year, that was not the case, and it was not only because of the uncertainty surrounding the playoff field as the sun rose. This year, it took hours longer than usual for all 41 FBS bowl matchups to become final. Those in flux all came from one conference: The ACC.

A piece of the explanation for what happened is believable and innocuous: The ACC itself and its bowls were not prepared for a scenario in which 13–0 Florida State was left out of the playoff field, and were therefore also not prepared for a scenario in which Louisville was not in the Orange Bowl. There was some preparation for the ReliaQuest Bowl (a New Year’s Day Bowl formerly named the Outback Bowl) to flip its tie from the ACC to the Big Ten, a contractual flip dependent on the Orange Bowl’s non-ACC selection that was little-known by the public but evidently well-known within the bowl industry. But while the ACC and its affiliated bowls were prepared for scenarios where 1) FSU made the playoff and Louisville made the Orange Bowl and 2) FSU lost to Louisville but still made a New Year’s Six bowl while Louisville still made the Orange Bowl, they were not prepared for the scenario where 3) FSU won but missed the playoff, sending FSU to the Orange Bowl and Louisville out onto the board with higher priority than any other ACC member, full or partial.

This was a little dumb of the ACC and its bowls. They should have, by Sunday morning, been aware of Louisville’s potential availability. But fair is fair, and they were surprised, and who among us was not thrown for a loop by the situation that materialized, prepared for it though we may have thought we were?

The worse part is that the ACC may have violated some contracts during the fallout.

This allegation has only been made anonymously, and I’m specifically aware of it only in an article from The Athletic which relies on individual anonymous sources. The allegation says that when representatives for the Gator Bowl, Holiday Bowl, and Pop-Tarts Bowl got on the phone with the ACC for the first round of ACC selections, expecting to choose between Louisville, NC State, and Notre Dame—the three best options available—they were told they could not choose Notre Dame. The allegation comes from an official with one of those three bowls. In the same article, an anonymous ACC official claims Notre Dame was available but was not guaranteed a spot, which matches our impression of the contracts but doesn’t match up with what happened. If Notre Dame was available, it’s very odd that the Pop-Tarts Bowl didn’t end up with Notre Dame.

The ACC’s 2023–24 rules, as we understand them, were that the Gator, Holiday, and Pop-Tarts Bowls got to choose between any teams within one win of another, but that because Louisville was two wins ahead of the fourth and fifth-best options, Louisville was guaranteed a place in one of those three bowls. The Athletic says NC State was also guaranteed a spot, because it had beaten both the fourth and fifth-best options (8–4 Clemson and 8–4 UNC) head-to-head. Following this process and acknowledging that 1) Kentucky was in the Gator Bowl, rendering Louisville not an option because it would lead to a regular season rematch, and 2) Notre Dame played in the Gator Bowl last year, rendering Notre Dame not an option because of a desire to avoid back-to-back bowl appearances, and 3) USC was in the Holiday Bowl, rendering Notre Dame not an option because of the regular season rematch angle again, one would assume this would mean NC State would go to the Gator Bowl, Louisville would go to the Holiday Bowl, and Notre Dame would go to the Pop-Tarts Bowl, which would presumably want Notre Dame ahead of both UNC and Clemson.

Instead, NC State ended up in the Pop-Tarts Bowl and the Gator Bowl chose Clemson over UNC.

There are still some innocuous possibilities for what happened here. One is that The Athletic miscommunicated what it was told by one or both of these anonymous sources. One is that the ACC official miscommunicated and left out the explanation, that Clemson had to be chosen ahead of Notre Dame (whom they beat head-to-head but trailed by one game in overall win-loss record) or something of that sort. But a not innocuous possibility is that the ACC strongarmed the Pop-Tarts Bowl into not inviting Notre Dame.

*Brian Windhorst voice*

Why would the ACC do that?

*back to Joe Stunardi voice*

If the ACC did bully the Pop-Tarts Bowl into taking NC State rather than Notre Dame, the assumption would be that the ACC was trying to get its full members into better bowl games than its partial member. That’s the reason that makes sense. But if the ACC was violating contracts to do this, that’s an issue, especially if its contract with the Pop-Tarts Bowl (or whichever is allegedly mad about this) continues into next year and beyond. Notre Dame is a bigger brand than most if not all ACC schools. Part of the value for bowls in aligning themselves with the ACC, poised to be the fourth-best conference in the nation next year after the Pac-12’s dissolution, is getting that crack at Notre Dame. If the ACC is going to push Notre Dame downwards, that lessens the value of the ACC tie for the bowl. Independently of Notre Dame, if the ACC violated its contract with the Pop-Tarts Bowl and the two have to continue working together, that might be an issue.

There’s also the question of how Notre Dame feels about this. Notre Dame is probably decently happy with where it ended up. Playing in Orlando would be preferable to playing in El Paso for their fanbase, but Oregon State is a comparable opponent to Kansas State, and the Sun Bowl isn’t all that easy to disparage, boasting plenty of history and a beautiful setting even if it falls a little further down the pecking order than it used to. But the precedent is concerning for the Irish. Could this lead to an ACC–Notre Dame rift? Is it a symptom of a rift that already exists?

My personal guess—Occam’s razor here, from my perspective—is that the ACC or the Pop-Tarts Bowl made an honest mistake. Either the ACC told the Pop-Tarts Bowl that Notre Dame wasn’t available by accident, some rattled staffer misunderstanding their own conference’s rules, or the Pop-Tarts Bowl took “Notre Dame isn’t guaranteed a place” as “you can’t take Notre Dame.” The situation was chaotic, and the ACC process is convoluted. But even if the mistake was honest, the possibility of a lawsuit or a future rift is relevant. This probably isn’t something to actively keep tabs on—I won’t be googling “Pop-Tarts Bowl ACC lawsuit” every day for the rest of the offseason—but if something does blow up, it’ll be good to remember this happened.

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More than anything, this episode is a good illustration of how funky bowl agreements are. For some conferences, the process is straightforward: The Big 12 appears to have a decently straight pecking order of which bowls get to pick when. For some bowls, the process is straightforward: If they have an SEC tie, the SEC tells them who they’re getting; if they’re a Group of Five bowl run by ESPN, ESPN solves the puzzle how it wants to and then tells the bowls what they get. But for a lot of these bowls, the process is complicated and arbitrary.

This is relevant to us because we tried doing bowl projections this year for the first time. We have our college football model, and it does a decent job of predicting outcomes, and we thought we’d try to apply those outcomes to bowls. We never found a confident enough projection, though, of how the bowl selection process worked, and so we never built out a fully automated process for slotting teams into bowls. Instead, we’d just go through the ties every week as we understood them and do our best, prioritizing teams with higher projected win totals and trying to create matchups between teams with better projected final rankings. This process was bad! Our bowl projections were bad. Some of this was that we didn’t understand the contracts and clauses like that which dictated the ReliaQuest Bowl’s options after the Orange Bowl was filled. But some of it is that there is an arbitrary streak to bowl selections, few rules are ironclad, and there are feelings involved.

So, next year, we’ll try to get some statements and explanations from bowls and conferences before the season begins. But for now, if you happen to scroll through our final bowl projections of the season, below, take them with a grain of salt. These come from after Saturday’s games but before the selection show, and we’re only even publishing them because we like having an archive to demonstrate how strong and weak our model is in various areas. The ratings and probabilities from that moment are below as well. Also for archival purposes.

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