Given the catastrophe that is the ACC Coastal, here is a sampling of the possible division scenarios:
- Duke wins out against GT and Miami. They win the division. Needless to say, it’s pretty rare for a team that controls its own destiny after 10 games to be double-digit underdogs in their two remaining games.
- GT beats Duke, Duke beats Miami. GT wins Coastal.
- Duke beats GT and loses to Miami. Miami wins Coastal.
- Duke loses to both GT and Miami, UNC goes 1-1 or 0-2 against UVA and Maryland. Miami wins Coastal by head-to-head win over GT earlier this year.
- Duke loses to both GT and Miami, UNC goes 2-0 to finish. This is where it gets fun. To save some trouble, it goes straight to ACC tiebreak rule #3, which I’ll quote here in all its confusing glory:
Head-to-head competition versus the team within the division with the best overall (divisional or conference) record, and proceeding through the division. Multiple ties within the division will be broken first to last.
In English, this means that that the teams in the tiebreak will have their head-to-head results against teams in the division that are outside the tiebreak group compared in descending order. In this scenario, the winner hinges on the winner of UVA-VT. If VT wins (assuming they beat BC), Miami goes to Charlotte.
If UVA wins, things get really interesting. There would then be a 3-way tie for 4th at 3-5, which would mean that the tie for 1st could not be broken until that was resolved (also, the tie for 4th can’t be broken until the tie for 1st is). Problem is that the rule says ties have to be broken from the top down, and none of these teams are likely to be ranked at the end of the year…so we’d possibly have to fall through to tiebreaker #8, which is a random drawing.
Update: If Miami self-imposes a postseason ban then we could potentially end up with a 4-way tie at 4-4 for “first” (GT loses to Duke, Duke loses to Miami, UNC goes 1-1, VT goes 2-0) due to a 5-3 Miami being ineligible.
In this scenario, VT and Duke would come out of the first set due to being 2-1 against the group. VT then takes it due to beating Duke head-to-head, I think. As far as I can tell, this is VT’s only possible scenario now that UNC is allowed to create ties.
Update 2: Ken Sugiura has a better version (worked out with help from the ACC league office) HERE
But since UNC can't win a division title, do they still figure into the tiebreak?
The ACC told ESPN that they do, hence this giant list instead of the much simpler one from this weekend.