ACC Considering Requiring Two Power-5 Nonconference Games?

On two fronts, the ACC is feeling the need to increase the degree of difficulty for their teams’ football schedules: 1. to make the teams more competitive in the race for lucrative College Football Playoff spots, and 2. to create interesting inventory for the impending ACC network, set to launch in 2019.

On the basketball side, the ACC expanded the conference schedule in anticipatio n of the ACC network launch. While the ACC has pondered and continues to ponder the possibility of expanding to nine conference games, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, they’re considering another alternative.

With a conference call to discuss scheduling issues set for this coming Friday, the ACC is reportedly considering requiring two power-5 games in nonconference play. While all the Power 5s have climbed aboard with requiring at least one of four nonconference games to be vs. a fellow P5, nobody has gone so far to require two.

I’m not sure mathematically this plan could really work out unless they carve out a lot of exceptions to the P5 rule, like allowing service academies to count, along with BYU and maybe even someone like a UConn or a Temple. But a move like this could at least reduce or eliminate some of the really bad intra-D1A mismatches that we see now.

I would personally rather see a 9-game ACC schedule than trying to finagle a 2 power-5 requirement, but either way would be fine with me. It’s probably only a matter of time (and further expansion) before games between power-5 and non power-5 teams become extremely rare or eliminated altogether, so the ACC might as well get ahead of the curve.