Duke punches ticket to ACC championship game
The last of 68 ACC football games this season was played between two of league’s newest members Saturday night.
The result, a 38-35 win by California against SMU, means Duke will play for the ACC championship next weekend.
Virginia punched its ticket by beating Virginia Tech on Saturday night. The Cavaliers finished 7-1 in the ACC; an early season loss to N.C. State was a non-conference game.
Duke finished in a five-way tie for second place in the standings at 6-2. The others in that tie are Pittsburgh, SMU, Georgia Tech and Miami.
The Blue Devils win the tiebreaker because of conference opponent winning percentage. Essentially, it helps that Duke only played two of the six ACC teams that finished with losing league records (UNC and Syracuse). It also helps that four of Duke’s six ACC wins came from a five-team cluster that finished 4-4 — those being N.C. State, Wake Forest, Clemson and Cal.
Next weekend’s game is an 8 p.m. kickoff that will be shown on ABC.
It’ll be a rematch of a game from two weeks ago. Virginia came to Durham and won 34-17 on Nov. 15, throttling the Blue Devils on both sides of the line of scrimmage and converting 12 of 19 third downs.
The 21st ACC championship game will be the second berth in each program’s history. Duke lost to eventual national champion Florida State, 45-7, in 2013. Virginia lost 62-17 in 2019 to Clemson, which was unbeaten at the time.
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