With a win at Pitt this week, Clemson would finish 7-1 in the ACC on the year. As we all know, the Tigers still need help to get into the ACC title game - in addition to winning at Pitt, they need either another Miami loss or two SMU losses.
Should that scenario not come to pass, Clemson would be on the outside looking in of the ACC title game largely thanks to the unbalanced schedules of the expanded mega-conference. In the ACC championship game era (beginning in 2005), only three teams have gone 7-1 in conference and missed the title game:
2016 Louisville
2013 Clemson
2012 Clemson
In each of these cases, of course, the 7-1 team lost to a team in their division with an equal or better conference record. Should 7-1 Clemson miss the title game this year, it would be without having played either of the two teams that make it, the first time anything like that has happened in ACC history.
Of course, this kind of thing is going to be more and more common across all power conferences moving forward, but it wasn't a given it would happen so quickly in this new era. Perhaps what was a given is that Clemson would be the team it would happen to - after all, it was Clemson on the outside 2 of the 3 previous times this happened. Clemson more than others seems to be really good at losing to exactly the wrong team. That is especially the case this year, where Louisville was one of just two teams on Clemson's schedule where a loss would put them on the ass-end of the tiebreakers (FSU, the team that beat Clemson in 2012 and 2013, being the other).
By the way, in the pre-CCG 8-game conference schedule era (1992-2004), only one team finished 7-1 or better in the ACC and didn't get at least a share of the conference title: 1997 North Carolina.
Should that scenario not come to pass, Clemson would be on the outside looking in of the ACC title game largely thanks to the unbalanced schedules of the expanded mega-conference. In the ACC championship game era (beginning in 2005), only three teams have gone 7-1 in conference and missed the title game:
2016 Louisville
2013 Clemson
2012 Clemson
In each of these cases, of course, the 7-1 team lost to a team in their division with an equal or better conference record. Should 7-1 Clemson miss the title game this year, it would be without having played either of the two teams that make it, the first time anything like that has happened in ACC history.
Of course, this kind of thing is going to be more and more common across all power conferences moving forward, but it wasn't a given it would happen so quickly in this new era. Perhaps what was a given is that Clemson would be the team it would happen to - after all, it was Clemson on the outside 2 of the 3 previous times this happened. Clemson more than others seems to be really good at losing to exactly the wrong team. That is especially the case this year, where Louisville was one of just two teams on Clemson's schedule where a loss would put them on the ass-end of the tiebreakers (FSU, the team that beat Clemson in 2012 and 2013, being the other).
By the way, in the pre-CCG 8-game conference schedule era (1992-2004), only one team finished 7-1 or better in the ACC and didn't get at least a share of the conference title: 1997 North Carolina.
