Manny Diaz calls ACC tiebreaker narrative Duke didn’t deserve 2025 title shot ‘insulting’

The ACC unveiled a complex new conference tiebreaker system earlier this week, seemingly partly in response to heavy criticism the league faced a year ago when playoff-bound and eventual national runer-up Miami was left out of the conference title game in favor of a five-loss Duke team. Duke coach Manny Diaz had a thing or two to say about that at the ACC Kickoff event on Friday. Frankly, he’s not a fan of how the picture has been painted. His Duke team, he said, was every bit deserving of its place in the ACC Championship Game … and even deserved a College Football Playoff bid, he said. [ $19.99 gets you a FULL year of On3 | Rivals national coverage ] “I heard we made the news. I heard we got a rule named after us,” Diaz said in his opening statement at the lectern in Charlotte. “It’s pretty cool, right? The Duke tiebreaker rule. I just want to start my remarks by addressing our thoughts on that. Inherent in the narrative of changing a tiebreaker for the conference championship game is the assertion that last year’s team was undeserved of being in the championship game. You hear that word, that now there will be more deserved teams in the championship game. “I want to push back against that narrative. I think it’s not just false, I think it’s insulting.” Duke, of course, sported a 6-2 conference mark at year’s end. Three of its five losses prior to the ACC title game came in the non-conference. Still, the optics were that a much inferior team than Miami was playing for the ACC crown. And the league has changed the tiebreaker rules, whether that was due to last year’s situation or not. Manny Diaz wanted to make it clear that his team was deserving last year. By the rules everyone agreed to, they were there in the championship game fair and square. “What we’re in is we’re in a competition. That’s what this is,” Diaz said. “Seventeen teams showed up here this weekend to compete for one championship. The most simple way to do that is if we could all play each other, right? We can’t do that. There’s too many damned teams. It would be great to have head-to-head, but there’s so many teams it’s hard to get us all together head-to-head. It would be cool to have common opponents, but you know what? It’s hard to have enough common opponents. “But the one thing you can do is you can add up all the wins and losses and you can add up all the wins and losses of the eight teams that you played against or the nine teams this year,” Diaz continued. “And by that metric, which is the most objective metric that you can possibly have, there’s no feelings or emotions involved in that, we were the top team to go play Virginia in that game. And then we thoroughly deserved the victory in a great game against an outstanding Virginia team, Tony Elliott, deserved Coach of the Year a year ago.” Manny Diaz went on to say he believes the ACC champion should earn a playoff bid. That will be the case this year thanks to a CFP rule change, but it was not for his Duke team last season. And it’s clear the narrative about last season and how it played out still doesn’t sit super well with Diaz. He made that much clear on Friday. “What also is deserved is that whoever wins this competition in this league, and what should be the discourse in this league, is that the conference champion should go to the CFP. That should happen. It’s respect for the league, it’s respect for what it means to play in this league, it’s respect to be one of the final two standing in this league,” Diaz concluded. “It should never have been — Miami should have been in before that weekend — but when we start talking about analytics and we start talking about committees then that’s how we people start getting flip-flopped, that’s how we start getting into very hard-to-define strength of schedule that are based off of recruiting rankings and last year and we start taking away from the one thing that we can control is watching two teams play and somebody wins and somebody loses, adding up the wins and losses of who they played against. That being said that’s something I think for the respect to the league, the respect to the teams and the coaches of the league.”