Jim Phillips addresses where ACC stands on moving to nine-game conference schedule

The ACC has played an eight-game conference schedule since 1992. In 2025, though, they’re having to consider their options like the other leagues when it comes to how many games they’ll play in that portion of their schedule.

ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips spoke about the conference’s opinion on eight games versus nine games during his forum to start the 2025 ACC Football Kickoff in Charlotte on Tuesday. He said nine games has been a debate for them but that there’s issues to consider when it comes to that within the Atlantic Coast Conference.

“We have discussed nine. We’ve discussed nine several times in my five years as commissioner,” said Phillips. “The group has always felt that, at the end of the day, those nine conference games have really been good for the league and we really have scheduled well. So, it isn’t as if our league has just kind of looked aside about strength of schedule. They have.

“If you go to nine, if the SEC ends up going to nine, and maybe we end up going to nine? I think there’s a few challenges. Those rivalry games that we really enjoy, I think that the fans really enjoy? I think some of those go away. And it now focuses more on everybody’s conference schedule than it is a mix of conference schedule and non-conference. Also, I think it’s a challenge for us with an odd number of schools at 17 and how you exactly work that out. So, that in itself, there’s some difficulty there.”

This is an overall matter around the sport with each of the four power conferences being at different amounts with the ACC and SEC with eight and the Big Ten and Big 12 at nine. That then affects how resumés are measured through strength of schedules when it comes to the end of the season and the selection of the College Football Playoff. That’s what each of the commissioners are trying to weigh, along with the selection committee, in terms of what’s best in finding some uniformity with the sport’s slates.

“I continue to talk to Greg (Sankey), and I talk to Tony (Pettiti), and Brett (Yormark) all the time. I mean, we have frequent conversations,” said Phillips. “So, no one is kind of moving in a vacuum on this. We’re exchanging, you know, thoughts there and we’ll see.

“I give Rich Clark and the CFP a lot of credit. We’ve pushed them too. It’s also been the commissioner’s wishes to really look at strength of schedule and what that metric and how that metric is used in the evaluation and ultimate selection of the CFP. This is year twelve, so eleven years ago, and it was a smaller format and, over the course of the last year or so, going to twelve has now put a greater emphasis because there’s more teams that you’re looking at and the competitive balance and resumes start to get blurred a little bit. So, SportSource Analytics is helping us look at that in a different way and we had a really good, kind of, presentation by them in June when we were in Asheville as commissioners, and then we had our CFP Meetings. So, we have to look at that.

“I think teams should be rewarded for playing good schedules and, if you’re in a really good conference like I feel like we are and others are, you should get rewarded for, you know, playing good teams within that conference. But you just don’t know. Every year is just a little bit different about how good teams are and, with the transfer portal and the movement of student athletes from one school to the next, it’s more and more difficult to really predict how teams are going to be until they start to play. It’s an important element that there’s clarity about strength of schedule and strength of record in the selection process. So, we’ll see kind of where that kind of ends up going but now is the time to kind of get that right. And, that may push us one way or the other, you know…So, we’ll see what happens moving forward.”

This conversation will continue on between what’s best between eight or nine games through the lens of metrics like strength of schedule. Still, for now, Phillips thinks that eight is a fine number, especially if they maintain what they’re putting together in their non-conferences.

“At the end of the day, I like where our league is. I like where we’re at at eight games because we’re playing the type of caliber that I described – 26 really good non-conference games,” said Phillips. “But, we’ll adjust if we have to and I think, for all of us, it remains a work in progress.”