ATLANTA (AP) — When Miami beat Texas A&M and Mississippi in the College Football Playoff last season before falling to Indiana in the championship game, it left the Atlantic Coast Conference 8-6 against Southeastern Conference schools for the 2025 season.
The success against the SEC emboldened ACC coaches' often-stated claim that their league doesn't receive enough credit in comparisons with other Power Four conferences.
Louisville coach Jeff Brohm
picked up that lobbying campaign at this year's ACC Football Kickoff when he said, “I think we have a great conference,” and added, “the ACC plays more powerful opponents than anyone in the country, so I don’t think we’re scared to play anybody.”
Added Brohm: “And I think the first week, we’ve got a couple interconference games that you’ll see LSU and Clemson match up, us and Ole Miss. And that’s kind of the proof in the pudding.”
So far in 2026, the proof in the pudding has not been as sweet for the ACC.
LSU opened with a resounding 51-10 victory over Clemson. A last-second field goal gave Ole Miss a 41-38 win over Louisville.
Suddenly, the ACC was on its way to an 0-5 start against SEC schools that has more than offset the league's 4-1 record against Big Ten teams. Overall, the ACC is 6-9 in nonconference games against Power Four teams.
The 0-5 record against the SEC does not mean the ACC has been overwhelmed. The win by Ole Miss wasn't the only last-second decision in matchups between the leagues.
Last week, N.C. State appeared to be assured of a win over Vanderbilt before quarterback CJ Bailey’s end-of-game fumble in the end zone gave the Commodores a touchdown and a 35-31 win. Also, Alabama trailed by 15 points before rallying to beat Florida State 50-36.
In a more convincing outcome for the SEC, Tennessee rolled to a 45-24 win at Georgia Tech after the Yellow Jackets opened their season with another Power Four loss to Colorado.
The SEC has 10 teams ranked in The Associated Press Top 25 and has a 10-2 record in nonconference games against Power Four teams. The ACC has only three Top 25 teams, including No. 6 Miami as the league's only representative in the top 15.
Even so, Duke coach Manny Diaz cautioned it would be wrong to place too much stock on the ACC losses to SEC teams without placing context on the close games and remembering the bigger Power Four picture. For example, three ACC teams — Duke, Wake Forest and Virginia Tech — have road wins this season over Big Ten teams.
“The game is about winning, that’s obvious, right?” Diaz said. “But when you look at some of the results in those games, it comes down to the last play of the game, a coin flip, per se."
Diaz said the Ole Miss-Louisville matchup was "a back-and-forth game, two outstanding offenses. Now, Ole Miss won, they’re an outstanding football team. I think Louisville is an outstanding football team, too, which they showed by beating SMU this past weekend in a back-and-forth, coin-flip type game.”
The ACC will have other opportunities against the SEC in such late-season rivalry games as Louisville at Kentucky, Georgia Tech at Georgia, Florida at Florida State and South Carolina at Clemson.Ultimately, more may be on the line than state bragging rights in those rivalry games. The Top 25 poll would indicate the ACC may be forced to hope the CFP committee remembers the “coin-flip” games when considering how many teams from the conference deserve a place in the playoff.
Diaz maintains that the ACC has been competitive in at least most of the SEC games while helping itself with the road wins against Big Ten teams.
“It is so addictive and so fun to sit there and say, ‘Ha, we beat you by one, therefore our entire conference is better than your entire conference,’” Diaz said. "That doesn’t mean you’re rationalizing a loss. The goal is to win the games. And of course as a conference, we want to represent ourselves well in our travels.
“But what I look at from a coaching standpoint is, how do the teams look when they’re on the field together? Do they look like peers? Does it look like a mismatch?”
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AP Sports Writer Aaron Beard in Durham, North Carolina, contributed to this report.
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