The Miami Hurricanes have many paths to the ACC Championship game, but they are all very narrow
The roads to Charlotte are very curvy and bumpy for Miami.
The Miami Hurricanes kept their ACC and College Football Playoff hopes alive last Saturday with a 34-17 win over Virginia Tech on the road, improving to 9-2 (5-2) on the season.
The good news? The Canes have a number of avenues to still reach Charlotte for the ACC Championship game. The bad news? Those paths require a good bit of tightrope walking. As in, the Canes need a number of very specific things to go their way for each one.
ESPN play-by-play announcer Mike Monaco put out the exhaustive list of scenarios for all remaining teams, and Miami has the most avenues open to them.
Miami has 8 potential paths to the ACC Championship game, but one is the cleanest
So, let’s get to it.
The cleanest way is if Miami wins against Pittsburgh, Duke loses to Wake Forest, Virginia loses to Virginia Tech, and SMU wins against Cal. No weird tiebreakers. The Canes are headed to Charlotte for a rematch against the Mustangs.
Pretty much every other path gets into a wild tiebreaker scenario at 6-2 with multiple teams. One of the tiebreakers that appears to be in play is conference opponent winning percentage. That then gets into NC State and Syracuse winning this weekend. Miami played and beat both teams, so logic would have it that they need the Cuse and Wolfpack to get wins and give Miami a slight bump in their winning percentage there – although some scenarios have those teams losing, to add more sludge to the murky mix of it all.
NC State hosts UNC, and Syracuse plays at Boston College, so wins there by both teams are definitely plausible, even with as pathetically poor as the Cuse are playing nowadays.
For Miami, they cannot have both Duke and Virginia win, even with an SMU loss in Berkeley. That scenario doesn’t fall within the eight listed above and would spell the end of the Canes’ ACC run. But if even one loses, there could be a path if they can get a little bit of help elsewhere from NC State and Syracuse. However, there is no path if SMU and Virginia both win even if Duke loses.
Got all that?
We’ll find out soon enough how things all shake out. Of course, Miami has to take care of its own business first against Pitt at noon on Saturday. If they can, then a very confusing day of scoreboard watching can begin for Miami fans.
