ACC backs 24-team College Football Playoff — but calendar concerns loom large

After sending just one team — Miami — to the 12-team College Football Playoff field last season, ACC coaches and administrators arrived at this week’s spring meetings with a clear priority: access.

And in a sport increasingly shaped by the financial and political power of the SEC and Big Ten, expansion to 24 teams is emerging as the league’s best path to secure it.

League sources who spoke to the N&O at the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island expressed overwhelming support among coaches and athletic directors for expanding the CFP to 24 teams, which is increasingly gaining traction across the college sports landscape. But the conversation has quickly expanded, it appears, beyond how many teams should make the playoff — and toward a more complicated question.

When exactly would they play?

“Among the coaches, I would say the biggest concerns are the calendar,” ACC senior vice president of football Michael Strickland said. “When do we start the season? How many open dates do we need or want? When does the playoffs start? And then when does it finish?”

Under the current model, the college football season is pushing deeper into January than ever before. For coaches, that’s not just inconvenient. It’s unsustainable.

“It goes well into January recruiting,” Strickland said. “It comes up almost straight up to February 1, which is the dead period … and then you’ve got spring recruiting. So the overlap, that creep, that’s a major issue that needs to be resolved.”

For programs across the Triangle — including UNC, N.C. State and Duke — those calendar pressures are already shaping how rosters are built and maintained.

Wolfpack coach Dave Doeren put it more bluntly.

“We can’t start Week 0 and finish at the end of January and think we’re doing what’s best for our athletes health-wise,” Doeren said. “We have to figure out how to make our season make sense and have a playoff. So that was part of the conversation — that we are in favor of expansion for all those reasons, and it needs to be coupled with our calendar being revised in a smart way.”

That tension appears central to the ACC’s position on CFP expansion. A larger playoff may create more access, but without significant calendar changes, it risks compounding the issues coaches are already navigating.

Expansion could reshape — or remove — conference championship

One of the clearest ripple effects of a 24-team playoff would come in early December.

As the field grows, the need and desire for conference championship games shrink.

“Why are we taking the two most successful teams and putting them in peril?” Strickland said. “(There’s) risk of injury. Anything could happen in the championship game when they’re already in the field.”

That reality would have major implications for the ACC’s championship game in Charlotte, a fixture of the league’s football identity and a key revenue generator. While Strickland noted the league has flexibility within its existing agreements (and thus wouldn’t face contractual hurdles should the ACC title game go kaput) the broader question looms: What replaces that inventory if it disappears?

The answer, it seems, is the playoff itself.

Access and a chance to fix the calendar

For ACC coaches, the push for 24 teams in the CFP is about staying relevant.

“Access is what teams want,” Doeren said. “So if you want to be a relevant team, you have to be a postseason team. Bowl games are what made you relevant before. Now the playoffs will be — if they expand moving forward.”

Under the current 12-team format, that path to relevancy is narrow. Miami was the ACC’s only representative last season, and the Hurricanes needed an at-large bid to get in.

A 24-team field would likely change that equation, creating more consistent access for leagues outside the sport’s two power centers: the SEC and Big Ten.

ACC officials also see potential upside in a larger playoff — not just in access, but in structure.

A redesigned format could allow the sport to reset its calendar: become a one-semester sport again, get the playoff back in December and still maximize New Year’s Day as a tent-pole day for college football.

It may also help address one of the sport’s growing contradictions — a postseason that overlaps with transfer-portal windows, recruiting periods and increasingly critical player movement.

For coaches like Duke’s Manny Diaz, that broad reset is long overdue.

“I think everybody understands our calendar is archaic,” Diaz said. “So to be able to update that, and get the feedback from the coaches … there’s nothing like getting everybody in a room together and have everybody express their opinions.”

Proposed changes extend beyond the game schedule.

At this week’s meetings, ACC coaches received a presentation on proposed changes to spring practice that would reshape the offseason. Under the model, programs would have access to 21 practices they could spread across several months. The flexibility would allow coaches to shift some on-field work (such as drills) into June and incorporate more OTA-style, non-contact sessions in July — a structure many see as a better fit for player development and recovery.

“I like doing more work, but I like doing it over a longer window of time, so I can have more recovery built in,” Doeren said. “Under the current model for (spring) training camp, you have 29 days to do 25 practices. That’s a lot of work in 29 days. So how about spreading that out over some more days?”

“Being able to play a little bit more on the field with those guys over a long period of time, I think, will help with the development and retention,” Doeren later added.

What does this mean back home?

For programs across North Carolina, the stakes are high.

A larger playoff could provide more realistic postseason paths for UNC, N.C. State and Duke — particularly in seasons where the ACC lacks a clear national title contender but features multiple competitive teams.

For now, the conference is still in evaluation mode.

There is a clear consensus in the ACC around a 24-team CFP model, but there is less clarity on how that model would be implemented — and who ultimately benefits.

The conference’s position, it seems, is a delicate one: advocate for expansion, push for access, and hope the final structure reflects both.

Because if the ACC doesn’t, the risk isn’t just falling behind.

It’s being left out altogether.