Diaz: Duke absolutely deserves title game berth

After Duke finished off Wake Forest on Saturday to move to 7-5 on the year, coach Manny Diaz had no expectations his team would be playing for a conference title, let alone have College Football Playoff aspirations. It wasn’t even talked about in the locker room, he said.

But now that Duke has secured its spot in Charlotte, North Carolina, with a chance to win the conference in a rematch with Virginia, he’s not apologizing for any of it.

Diaz said Sunday that Duke “absolutely” belongs in the title game thanks to a 6-2 conference record and that, if the Blue Devils win Saturday, they should one of the five highest-ranked conference champions and receive a berth in the playoff.

“We have five losses, and we wish we’d played better in those games,” Diaz said. “But we lost to two 10-win teams, two nine-win teams and an eight-win team. Records have a lot to do with schedules.”

Duke lost three nonconference games, including two on the road in one-possession games to teams outside the Power 4 — at Tulane, which will play for the American championship, and at UConn.

That has opened the door for a second Group of 5 conference champion to snag an automatic playoff bid over Duke, should the Blue Devils win the ACC title. Currently Virginia, Duke’s opponent in Charlotte, is ranked ahead of anyone in the American or Sun Belt, but Tulane (10-2), North Texas (11-1) and James Madison (11-1) all have metrics and records that could push them ahead of the Blue Devils.

Diaz downplayed that option, noting that he has previously coached at Group of 5 schools and does not see their pathway to the postseason as being anywhere close to what his team has faced.

Diaz said Duke’s willingness to go on the road for those games shouldn’t be the reason it’s left out of the playoff, should it win the ACC, and doing so would set a bad precedent.

“If that’s the issue, that’ll just never happen again,” Diaz said. “The argument that a Group of 5 team should be in the playoff at the ACC’s expense, you can forget about ever booking a home-and-home and encouraging teams to play good competition at home and away. We could’ve just scheduled better and gotten nine wins.”

Diaz referred to comments from Texas coach Steve Sarkisian, who said Texas’ Week 1 trip to Ohio State — a 14-7 loss — shouldn’t be what keeps the Longhorns from the playoff as a result of having three losses on the season.

Duke’s berth in the ACC championship game comes as the result of the league’s fifth tiebreaker — combined win percentage of conference opponents — after three teams tied at 6-2 in league play. That tiebreaker leaves out Miami, which is the ACC’s highest-ranked team overall and holds nonconference wins over Notre Dame, USF and Florida.

Diaz said the convoluted tiebreaker scenarios are likely to be a fixture of future conference championship games because of the sheer size of modern leagues — one reason he said he has come around to the idea of having automatic bids for the playoff for each conference.

“Any way you tweak a tiebreaker, someone’s going to be pissed,” Diaz said. “Nobody thought about tweaking tiebreakers before we had these bloated conferences. This is not just an ACC problem. This will happen every year. … Everybody can’t play everybody, so you have to expand the playoff and you’re going to have to have guaranteed bids from every conference, and those conferences are going to have to play it off every year. Or else we’re going to go down to coin flips and algorithms every year. This is never going away.”

Diaz said without creating ways for playoff decisions to be made on the field there will “always be a beauty pageant,” but said he thinks college football remains “a long ways away” from an ideal formula.

Diaz also alluded to situations at Ole Miss, North Texas and Tulane, where coaches of potential playoff teams have already opted to leave for other jobs.

“We refuse to protect the sanctity of football season, and that’s a bad thing,” Diaz said. “We’re not protecting the sanctity of chasing a championship, and that has to change. There are things that have to change. We’re talking about tweaking tiebreakers — we know it. Everybody gets it. We’ve got to keep trying to make this game better because the product on the field is so good, and we’re not — the grown-ups often mess it up for the kids.”

As for the actual game on the field Saturday, Duke will face a Virginia team that beat the Blue Devils 34-17 just three weeks ago in what Diaz called “the worst performance” of their season.

“There will be some things on the chalkboard that both teams want to hone in on, but the big thing for your guys is just to play better,” Diaz said. “We played poorly that night.”

If others think that loss — along with four others — should be disqualifying, however, Diaz isn’t interested in the argument.

“Who we’ve played has been difficult, and we’ve learned through those losses to become a team that absolutely is worthy of being in Charlotte on Saturday night, and whatever happens beyond that.”