The ACC’s lone College Football Playoff representative, the No. 10 Miami Hurricanes, will face off against No. 2 Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl tonight to kick off the quarterfinals. 

The ACC isn’t the only league with one team remaining in the CFP. The Big 12 also has only one representative: conference champion and No. 4–ranked program Texas Tech. But there was never a doubt that the Big 12 would have a program in the CFP. The ACC, on the other hand, was almost left out of the 12-team field completely.

Thanks to a first-round upset win, the Canes now have the chance to earn the conference up to $20 million based on how far they advance in the postseason.

How We Got Here

The CFP allows automatic bids for the top-five ranked conference champions, which were assumed to come from the four power conferences and the top-ranked Group of 6 conference. 

But the ACC ended up with an unranked Duke program as the ACC conference champion, and, as a result, it was left out of the automatic qualifiers completely. Instead, the fourth and fifth AQs went to Group of 6 programs Tulane and JMU. No. 17 Virginia would have secured a spot if it had beaten Duke. (Indiana, Georgia, and Texas Tech earned AQs for the Big Ten, SEC, and Big 12, respectively.)

The situation didn’t just kill the ACC’s opportunity to secure an automatic qualifier; it threatened the ACC’s ability to get a program into the 12-team field at all. 

Going into conference championship weekend, Notre Dame was ranked No. 10, the Big 12’s BYU was ranked No. 11, and Miami was ranked No. 12. The assumption was that Notre Dame would take the final spot. But in one of the most controversial moves in CFP history, the selection committee flip-flopped and gave Miami the final at-large spot, ranking it above both BYU and Notre Dame. 

The committee was vindicated, however, when the Canes upset No. 7 Texas A&M on the road in the first round.

A $20M Potential Payday

There’s plenty at stake for the ACC beyond just bragging rights—the CFP awards more than $100 million in prize payouts to conferences based on how well their teams fare. 

The Canes have already earned $8 million for the ACC, and they have the opportunity to earn another $12 million.

For making it into the 12-team field, Miami earned $4 million for the ACC. By advancing to the quarterfinals, the Canes earned another $4 million. If they upset Ohio State, they’ll take home an additional $6 million. Teams that advance to the national championship earn another $6 million.

The ACC also receives $3 million for each round the Canes advance to cover travel expenses.

New Year, New Rules

Next year, all power conferences will be guaranteed to have at least one team in the 12-team field due to a rule change regarding the automatic qualifiers.

Each power conference champion will be guaranteed an automatic qualifier, with the top-ranked Group of 6 conference champions receiving the fifth AQ slot. That would eliminate the possibility that an unranked power conference champion would lose out on a slot. 

Notre Dame can rest easy, too. The Fighting Irish, who compete as independents in football and therefore don’t have a conference championship game to play in, are guaranteed a spot in the field if their overall ranking is in the top 12.

Even with a lesser lineup of games for Christmas, the National Football League made history on the holiday.

Netflix said Wednesday that it averaged 27.5 million U.S. viewers for its late-afternoon game between the Lions and Vikings, breaking an NFL streaming record of 24 million it previously set on Christmas 2024. 

An earlier Christmas Day matchup between the Cowboys and Commanders on Netflix, meanwhile, averaged 19.9 million, a figure more in keeping with the diminished expectations for the holiday that featured five non-playoff teams among the six competing franchises.

The Detroit-Minnesota game, however, peaked at more than 30 million U.S. viewers, further showing the league’s unrivaled drawing power, even for a game with minimal competitive implications. Helping burnish the overall viewership was a halftime show starring hip-hop icon Snoop Dogg, and the presentation, Snoop’s Holiday Halftime Party, averaged 29 million U.S. viewers.

Globally, the Cowboys-Commanders game averaged 22.4 million viewers, while the Lions-Vikings game averaged 30.5 million. 

Amazon Sets Its Own Record

A primetime Christmas matchup between the Broncos and Chiefs averaged 21.06 million viewers on Amazon, setting a regular-season record for the NFL on that platform.

The figure beats a figure of 19.4 million set earlier this month for a Cowboys-Lions game on Thursday Night Football. It’s also the third time this season that Amazon has set a record for its NFL viewership in the regular season. Amazon established the latest mark even with the worst Chiefs team in more than a decade and the absence of star quarterback Patrick Mahomes due to a season-ending injury.

Both Netflix and Amazon used Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel measurement process, now the industry’s established standard, as opposed to YouTube’s use of a non-accredited methodology for a September game, generating widespread controversy. 

Amazon will have a wild-card playoff game next weekend, and it will look to beat the NFL streaming record that Netflix just set. A Steelers-Ravens game from last year’s opening round averaged 22.1 million on Amazon, and it remains the company’s biggest NFL audience to date.

Beating the NBA

After another rather spirited back-and-forth between the NFL and the NBA—and their respective supporters—about who should have supremacy on Christmas, the average football viewership of 22.9 million for the tripleheader more than quadrupled the NBA’s average of 5.5 million on Disney-owned platforms for a generally strong five-game set.

Compared against itself, though, the NBA figures showed marked growth, from both a year ago and historically. The average was up 4% from 2024’s average, and the overall reach of 47.2 million unique viewers was up 45% from last year and represented the most-watched Christmas for the league in 15 years, excluding a season-opening set of holiday games in 2011. 

The second NBA game of the day, the Spurs against the defending champion Thunder, led Christmas viewership with an average of 6.7 million. That beat the draws for games involving frequent Christmas participants such as the Lakers, Warriors, and Knicks. 

The NFL’s comparable Christmas reach figure, according to industry sources, was 76 million.

The success of College Football Playoff home games in the first round has led to many fans, coaches, and pundits across the sport calling for more postseason matchups to be played on campuses.

Under the current 12-team CFP format, the quarterfinals and semifinals are played on a rotating basis at neutral-site New Year’s Six bowl games.

Next season, ESPN’s six-year, $7.8 billion media-rights contract extension kicks in, and that format is set to remain intact, unless the CFP management committee—made up of FBS conference commissioners and Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua—were to decide to switch things up, a CFP source tells Front Office Sports.

Last week, Oregon coach Dan Lanning said he believed his No. 5 Ducks should be preparing for a true road trip instead of a neutral-site matchup with No. 4 Texas Tech. “In my opinion, we’re really excited to be going to the Orange Bowl—but this game should be played at Texas Tech, the higher-seeded team,” Lanning said.

And as on-campus games give way to neutral-site matchups for the remainder of the CFP, resale ticket prices show there has been less demand for the quarterfinals than the first round over the first two years of the 12-team CFP era. The drop in ticket prices for this year’s Rose Bowl, under $100 on Ticketmaster (the game’s official ticketing provider) as of Wednesday afternoon, is particularly jarring, given the game’s premier status in college football. The cheapest face value Rose Bowl tickets were $196.

Another wrinkle that may have an impact on where future CFP games are played is a pending decision on expanding beyond 12 teams for the 2026 season. ESPN pushed back a deadline for the CFP to inform the network of its format for next season from Dec. 1 to Jan. 23.

Expanding to 16 teams would likely add four more first-round home games. However, shifting the quarterfinals (and potentially semifinals) from bowl games to on-campus contests would not necessarily be approved at the same time as expansion.