ACC Football: Conference's Coaches Echo Self-Preservation Mantra of Jim Delany

Here at Your Best 11, we've been mighty hard on Jim Delany and his assault on the SEC, 2011 Alabama to be specific, during the BCS meetings. It must be noted however, that he is not the only one pushing a more selfish agenda when it comes to how the playoff is structured. While most folks are looking at the ACC battling through the television contract-Florida State-Big 12 ordeal, the league meetings have another agenda on the table: the direction of the postseason.

The futility of the ACC has been cataloged quite well, and as Dabo Swinney thinks, "at some point" the NCAA will have a champion, and the conference is working to make the road to the title a little bit easier. From Amelia Island, the word from the ACC comes in support of the conference champions getting into the four-team playoff. Whether it is posturing to present solidarity, as many suspect with coach Jimbo Fisher, or legitimate self-preservation, the ACC has a very Jim Delany-ish feel to it during its spring meetings. As Fisher says:

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"There has to be some stipulation in there about champions," Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher said. "Because not everybody plays the same schedule. We play a nine-game conference schedule. Other teams don’t. That’s weighed in. Some conferences have a conference championship game. Others don’t. Being a conference champion is no small task. Not only are you going through your conference, then you turn around and play a conference championship game. There has to be a lot of weight given to conference champions."

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Quite convenient for the league that has only had one team in the Top Four to end the season in the last decade (spare me the Miami comments, they were in the Big East, and ACC Miami is not your daddy's Miami). If the Big Ten has had a rough go of it in the last couple seasons, the ACC has been quagmired in a college football depression of epic proportions when it comes to elite teams.

None of this is great for college football. The rhetoric about the immense value of a conference championship rings quite hollow. No one is stumping for winning the Sun Belt or MAC as a sort of seminal accomplishment. Winning your conference is just that: winning the conference. It does not speak to how great you are in the overall landscape of college football.

Virginia Tech winning the ACC in 2010 was not an tremendous achievement. It was a team that lost to Boise State and then got blasted by Stanford, beating a bunch of other teams that were not very good. Wisconsin winning the Big Ten this season was not a testament to its power as a football team on the national scale. It was a Badgers team winning a league filled with pretty good teams but none that were elite.

The goal of this playoff should be to get the cream of the crop in. It is great to win your conference championship, and that, in and of itself, is a reward. Winners of conference titles should not be gifted a spot into a playoff; those four spots should be earned, as the playoff supporters say, on the field. If two of them happen to be from one conference, then so be it. Suck it up, play in your tied-in bowl game and get better next year.