CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- SMU coach Rhett Lashlee went to bat for reigning ACC champion Duke, saying the Blue Devils should have made the last College Football Playoff instead of Sun Belt champ James Madison.
Lashlee, speaking Friday at the ACC Kickoff, congratulated Duke on its title and said the team "easily" should have made the CFP despite five regular-season losses and not being ranked in the CFP standings. The previous CFP formula called for the five highest-rated conference champions to receive automatic berths, which allowed James Madison, ranked No. 24, to join American Conference champ Tulane (No. 20) in the CFP.
Duke finished outside the final top 25 despite upsetting Virginia in the league championship game. James Madison lost 51-34 at Oregon in a first-round CFP game.
"When you win the ACC the way they did, and who they beat, they should have been in instead of a team from the Sun Belt," Lashlee said of Duke. "Hopefully, things get learned, and that doesn't happen again. We should have been a two-bid league."
Beginning this season, the champions of the four power conferences -- ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC -- will receive automatic berths, including the highest-rated team from a Group of 6 conference (American, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac-12, Sun Belt). The ACC on Wednesday announced a new tiebreaker formula for its championship game, which will rely on head-to-head results but also a team's "body of work," determined by the Team Success Ranking from SportSource Analytics, also used by the CFP.
"You have to do everything you can to position your championship game with those two best teams," commissioner Jim Phillips said. "Head-to-head matters. That's always most important. Then we will look at the grouping and how teams fared. It will come down to body of work."
Duke coach Manny Diaz told ESPN he did not like the tiebreaker change because the "body of work" metric includes nonconference games.
"I don't like it at all," Diaz said. "You can't have non-conference games dictate who wins the conference. Forget about our scenario last year. Is a good loss better than a bad win out of conference? The only way to make it a true competition is head to head and then what was the record of who you beat? And that's it. Anything else pulls in analytics that no one really knows, and they can be skewed. It's like determining the English Premier League champion based on how they played in the Champions League. They're not the same thing."
Lashlee said the coaches were not consulted on the tiebreaker change and was only made aware of it when the league announced it on Wednesday. He also does not believe nonconference games should factor into the body of work.
"Time will tell," Lashlee said. "I know they did their due diligence with 10,000 simulations and all that. I'm not huge on data points and analytics deciding things because they can be manipulated. However, in this in the current climate we're in, if we're going to do that, let's use the same one the CFP uses. I'd rather do that than flip a coin."
ESPN's Andrea Adelson contributed to this report.