However, since the 2023 title game, the ACC no longer sends the Atlantic and Coastal champions to meet in Charlotte.
The current champions, the Clemson Tigers, defeated the SMU Mustangs after the 2024 regular season concluded.
Starting from the 2023 season onwards, the game will instead pit the two ACC teams with the highest conference winning percentage against each other, with divisions being scrapped entirely.
Virginia Tech returned to the ACC Football Championship game and faced off against Boston College.
In 2009, Georgia Tech defeated Clemson, 39–34, but was forced to vacate the ACC championship by the NCAA.
This means that the ACC Championship will no longer be determined by the two division winners, but will instead have the two teams with the highest conference winning percentage face each other.
[4] In 1990, the eight-team Atlantic Coast Conference added Florida State to the league, creating a new nine-team ACC.
[5] Though Florida State was the only school added to the conference, some league officials discussed offering one or more other schools—Navy, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, South Carolina, Miami, West Virginia, Boston College, Rutgers, or Virginia Tech—an offer to join the league.
The nearby Southeastern Conference (SEC), which also encompasses college football teams in the American South, also expanded in 1990.
[13] After a month of debate, however, the ACC elected to extend formal invitations to Miami, Boston College, and Virginia Tech, which joined after initially being overlooked.
Miami and Virginia Tech began official ACC play with the 2004 college football season.
[15] After the league settled a lawsuit resulting from the departure of the three former Big East Conference teams,[16] Boston College began ACC play in the 2005 season.
The prospect of tens of thousands of visitors could provide a multimillion-dollar economic boost for a host city and region while requiring few, if any, additional facilities.
Even before Virginia Tech, Miami, and Boston College were chosen as the ACC's picks to expand, Carolinas Stadium Corporation, the owner and operator of Charlotte's Ericsson Stadium (as it was called then) lobbied heavily for Charlotte's selection.
[19][20][21] Shortly after negotiations for the location of the game began during the spring of 2004, the ACC announced that it had signed a new, seven-year television contract with ABC and ESPN.
[29] Following the absorption of Virginia Tech and Miami into the ACC, questions arose about how an 11-team league could fairly select participants in the conference championship game.
Hence, every year, there are these football games: Georgia Tech vs. Clemson; North Carolina vs. North Carolina State; Louisville vs. Virginia; Syracuse vs. Pittsburgh; Duke vs. Wake Forest; Florida State vs. Miami; and Boston College vs. Virginia Tech.
Instead of a divisional structure where teams play a round-robin schedule within their division, it will instead move to a 3-5-5 format.
Under this format, the two ACC teams with the highest conference winning percentage will be eligible to play in the championship.
[35] Notre Dame joined the conference as a non-football member in 2014 and, while playing five ACC teams each season, is not eligible for the championship game.