Clemson Tigers head coach Dabo Swinney often waxes poetic about his time as a former walk-on turned national champion with his alma mater, the Alabama Crimson Tide. It’s a rags-to-riches story that is a good reminder of what is still possible with a little hard work and a few good breaks going your way.

Going into the ACC championship game on Saturday night against the SMU Mustangs, however, Swinney has a chance to repay his former program by doing the funniest thing possible: send the Tide packing from the College Football Playoff and cause an already existing crisis of confidence in his league to spiral even further.

That’s how things are set up on conference title game weekend in the aftermath of the CFP selection committee’s penultimate set of rankings. As much as fans may have wanted to zero in on potential hosts for those opening-round playoff games or see if that Boise State Broncos bus can drive itself all the way to a first-round bye, the real inflection point was really a narrow band of two bubble teams where the debate this season comes down to. 

That would be No. 11 Alabama vs. the No. 12 Miami Hurricanes for the last spot in the bracket. One team left for dead just a few weeks ago is in. The team most assumed was safely in, all of seven days ago, appears down and out for the count. 

“Look, both of them are very good,” committee chairman and Michigan Wolverines athletic director Warde Manuel said in explaining the ordering of the pair. “The committee ranked Alabama one ahead of Miami, but it doesn’t diminish how we see Miami, even with the last three weeks where they have two losses. We still think Miami is a very strong team.

“It came down to a difference in their body of work as we evaluated Alabama and Miami, not just wins, not just losses, but the totality of the season and how those teams performed.”

In the 12-team CFP era, the four-seed versus the five-seed is a non-debate—last year’s controversy surrounding the Florida State Seminoles is a thing of the past. With expansion bringing clear guidelines surrounding how teams will stack up against each other and how they’re seeded, the first team out versus the last one in is where all the debate is rooted. This is where the committee is supposed to earn their nonexistent pay. 

If you were to ask those in the ACC, well, you’d probably get a response that those committee members voting on teams are not even worth that kind of paycheck at the moment. Conference commissioner Jim Phillips sent out a tersely worded statement all but pleading the same case.

“Miami absolutely deserves better from the committee,” the statement said, in part. “As we look ahead to the final rankings, we hope the committee will reconsider and put a deserving Miami in the field.”

Will they, though? As things stand now, that looks more like wishful thinking as opposed to the reality of the playoff field until Saturday’s results crystallizes it for good.

The Hurricanes have one of the best offenses in the country and are led by a dynamic, Heisman Trophy–candidate quarterback in Cam Ward. The only two blemishes on their resume are a pair of losses on the road by a combined nine points—to the Syracuse Orange and a Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets squad that just pushed the No. 5 Georgia Bulldogs to eight overtimes. They had a quality, albeit not top 25, win over the Florida Gators in the Swamp and thumped the South Florida Bulls that the Tide struggled to put away for three quarters. They beat a nine-win Duke Blue Devils side and won a shootout over a solid Louisville Cardinals team, too. 

“Miami, up until the last three weeks, they’ve had a very good season. But they’ve lost two of the last three weeks,” Manuel said. “Miami, top offense in the country with 44 points and over 500 yards per game. So it’s really close. It’s not just one data point over the other.”

Meanwhile, the Tide may no longer have Nick Saban as their head coach but the brand bias may take a few years to fully filter out of the system. The committee seems to define them only with regard to their high ceiling as opposed to the glaringly obvious low floor that has shown up in three losses in conference play. 

Alabama is 3–1 against top-25 teams (wins against Georgia, the No. 19 Missouri Tigers and No. 14 South Carolina Gamecocks balanced out by a loss at the No. 7 Tennessee Volunteers). The Tide also have some inexplicable losses, all on the road, to the Vanderbilt Commodores and Oklahoma Sooners. Falling by a touchdown to the Vols at Neyland Stadium isn’t terrible, but it is one more in the loss column than Miami has overall. 

There’s little doubt the Tide have played a more challenging slate, but they’ve also lost to the dregs of their schedule. It says more about the November chaos that has subsumed the sport that Kalen DeBoer’s team is even in the field as opposed to sitting Selection Sunday firmly out. Such is the playoff picture at the moment, where you have to squint to make out the positives for teams down the rankings and find your reading glasses to parse the negatives. 

Then, there’s lil’ ol’ Clemson lurking around, seemingly waiting just for this moment to ruin their national rival from recent playoff runs in Alabama and conference mate Miami.  

The Tigers lost to South Carolina, but have the committee sitting on pins and needles this weekend as they backed into the game in Charlotte against SMU. Swinney’s side hasn’t beaten anybody of note (zero top-25 wins) and lost to the three teams with a pulse on their schedule (34–3 to Georgia in the opener, 17–14 to the Gamecocks and 33–21 to Louisville). They ate up a mediocre middle class in the ACC, but find themselves as the great beneficiaries of the new system: win your (Power 4) conference championship and you’re in the field. 

To borrow a March Madness term, the first bid thief in the playoff era is set to be Clemson if it can do what no ACC team has done so far and beat the Mustangs.

It might give new meaning to Swinney’s catchphrase: “Bring your own guts.” It certainly is going to cause some queasy ones in Grapevine, Texas, as the committee debates where in the field to put ACC champion Clemson, should the Tigers win, and what might happen to SMU. 

“Potentially, yes,” Manuel said when asked if SMU could drop behind Alabama. “And they can move above teams, as well. Again, it just depends on the outcome of the game.”

Spare a penny for those around Phillips on Saturday night should that scenario come to fruition. It’s bad enough his league is being sued by Clemson, imagine how he’ll feel handing over a trophy that may well cost the conference yet another spot in the playoff, too? 

If there’s any solace to those in Charlotte, at least a Tigers win will also render the Alabama discussion moot. 

Funny how things could work out. Something says the committee won’t be chuckling when they have to cast their final votes in the end, though.