AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. -- ACC commissioner Jim Phillips backed a 24-team expanded College Football Playoff format Wednesday, a move supported by the majority of the league's coaches and athletics directors.
The Big Ten initially proposed the 24-team model, and it has started to gain traction as the discussions about expanding the playoff have moved forward. Though there was no consensus on an expanded playoff field when the CFP spring meetings concluded last month, Phillips believes that greater access to the playoff is vital for the long term.
"When you're leaving national-championship-contending teams out of the playoff, you don't have the right number," Phillips said. "We suffered through it with Florida State when the field was four, and I know other schools have suffered for it, and I've said this very directly. Notre Dame was a CFP-worthy team this year.
"If you're going to ask presidents and chancellors and boards to continue to invest in their football programs, it's really important that they have hope, that they have an opportunity at the beginning of the season to get into the playoff."
There remains work to be done. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey remains in favor of a 16-team playoff. Ultimately, the Big Ten and SEC must be unanimous in deciding what the future playoff format will be.
From the perspective of ACC coaches, there are obvious benefits.
"Our current playoff is perfect for the mid-'90s, when we had small conferences," Duke coach Manny Diaz said. "Look at what we've done now. We have huge conferences, where everybody can't play everybody within a conference. We're going to nine conference games, which means that there's less interconference action, so you can't tell is the third team in this league better than the fifth team in that league.
"So, what you have to do is play it out in a playoff. Is it what we all grew up with? No. But it's a response to the changes that have happened across the national landscape. With the portal and NIL, it's brought more parity. There are more teams that can win now and compete for a championship now than there have been before. The response to that is a bigger playoff."
Most ACC coaches pointed to the run to the national championship game by the Miami Hurricanes -- the last team in the field last year as an at-large -- as one reason access should be improved.
However, Miami coach Mario Cristobal, in an appearance last week on ESPN's "This Is Football," said he wasn't in favor of a 24-team playoff and would rather finish the regular season earlier, have one bye week and then start playoff games.
"I'm not for the 24-team thing," Cristobal told ESPN's Kevin Clark. "That's a lot. Why play a regular season then? And I'm certainly not for automatic bids ... like, why? It's not a beauty pageant. It's not a beauty contest. It's competition. Go win. Go win on the field, and guys that deserve it, get in, and figure it out from there."
SMU coach Rhett Lashlee, who is on the board of the American Football Coaches Association, said expanding to 24 teams would also help fix the myriad issues with the college football calendar. The AFCA recently proposed four calendar changes, including eliminating conference championship games and reducing the minimum number of days between postseason games to no fewer than six.
That would allow the season to end the second Monday in January and potentially get two weekends of home playoff games in December.
"Nobody thinks we should be playing a national title game on January 24th or January 25th," Lashlee said. "So, when we started looking at everything, how do we fix our calendar? One of the things that can help us do that is going to 24. At the end of the day, sometimes there's perfect and there's better. We can't ever get to perfect, but what we can make better is our calendar, and that's one of the first steps."
Lashlee said it makes more sense to eliminate the conference championship games because those teams are probably going to be in the 24-team playoff.
"We've been playing college football for 167 years. We've only had conference championship games for 34. You have to be able to modernize around what our game is now," Lashlee said. "Those games are big, but if you can have a weekend of eight on-campus playoff games, that's probably going to be a good offset."
Virginia Tech coach James Franklin said the view has to be approached in a way where "the bowl system as we know it may not continue."
"If that's the case, then you want to make the playoff as big as you possibly can. So, by going to 24, that's going to keep as many teams alive as possible, which I think will be good."
As for what a 24-team model would look like, Phillips said discussions have not reached that level yet. There also are questions about the role of the selection committee.
Lashlee said he would be in favor of four teams from each of the Power 4 conferences getting automatic spots.
Nothing has been decided, and there are still discussions to be had among the commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua when they meet again in June. Clark has previously said that if any changes are going to be made in time for the 2027 season, the decision needs to be made by Dec. 1.
"We'll see what it looks like from a calendar standpoint," Phillips said. "We'll see what it looks like from a nonconference standpoint. We'll see what it looks like from viewership and the games and where you play those games.
"I'm looking forward to seeing in June what information that the CFP staff comes to us with."