Can Louisville Football Still Make The ACC Championship?
By Caleb Hall
Can Louisville make the ACC Championship after losing to Pitt?
Louisville was eying the ACC Championship this year after a perfect 6-0 (3-0) start to season. However, last week’s conference loss to Pitt may have tarnished that hope.
As of right now the top 4 in the ACC stand like this:
Florida State: 4-0
North Carolina: 3-0
Duke: 2-0
Louisville: 2-1
The odd thing about this year’s ACC schedule is that North Carolina, Florida State, and Louisville will not play each other. Duke will play the rest of the top 4 including FSU this week and Louisville next week. For Louisville to make the ACC Championship game they would need to win out the rest of their conference schedule which includes: Duke, Virginia Tech, Virginia, and at Miami. Along with winning all of those games, they would also need Florida State or North Carolina to lose a game. If FSU or UNC lose to Duke and Louisville beats Duke then the Cardinals would an advantage over them.
The first overall tiebreaker would be head to head for the ACC standings but since FSU, UNC and Louisville won’t play it goes to win percentage over all common opponents.
Here are the ACC tiebreaker rules for the conference:
1: Head-to-head competition between the two tied teams.
2: Win-percentage against all common opponents
2: Win-percentage versus common opponents based on their order of finish
3: Combined win-percentage of conference opponents.
4: The tied team with the higher ranking by the team rating score metric by SportSource Analytics following the end of regular season games.
5: The representative shall be chosen by a draw as administered by the Commissioner
Bottom Line for the Cardinals:
The best way for the Cardinals to get to Charlotte in November is to win out their remaining ACC games and hope that either FSU or North Carolina lose to Duke or lose 2 ACC games in their final schedule slate.
The good news is that Louisville will have 3 of their last 4 ACC games at home and the Cardinals are on a 8 game home winning streak. If they can take care of business against Duke, Virginia, and Virginia Tech, and sneak out a road victory at Miami they will just need to hope for a few losses to some other ACC teams as well.
It will be a tough road for Louisville to make it to Charlotte. But they definitely have the opportunity to if Jeff Brohm can get them back in the win column in October 28th’s matchup, against the Duke Blue Devils.