The era of supersized conferences can lead to supersized chaos. Just ask the wide-open ACC

Rhett Lashlee lost track midsentence. Considering the sentence, how could you blame him?

The SMU coach was running down the list of teams that have a shot at reaching the ACC title game entering the final weekend of the regular season and then just sort of gave up.

“Both us and Virginia have that opportunity this week,” Lashlee said. ” Pitt’s still in it. Miami. Duke. I think there’s a lot of people still in it.”

In the end, perhaps too many — Lashlee inadvertently left out Georgia Tech — for the Power Four conference everyone loves to pick on to receive multiple berths into the College Football Playoff.

In all, there are a half-dozen ACC teams with viable — albeit in some cases, unlikely — paths to Charlotte, North Carolina, on the first Saturday in December, when the league title game winner could lock up a spot in the CFP.

The ACC is hardly the only conference where order may descend into chaos. There are still four teams in the mix to make it to the Big Ten championship. The same goes for the Big 12 and the SEC.

Yet the handwringing in the ACC is particularly acute. This is the same league, after all, that saw an unbeaten Florida State shut out of a four-team CFP two years ago due in large part to an injury to quarterback Jordan Travis. The aftertaste of the disrespect still lingers.

Parity at a price

The CFP has since expanded to 12 schools, and while Commissioner Jim Phillips believes the ACC always should have two representatives in the playoff — something it managed last year when Clemson and SMU received berths — the reality is the parity that makes the league compelling can also serve as a double-edged sword when it gets to playoff time.

The ACC has five teams in the current CFP Top 25. Only the Big Ten and the SEC have more. Yet Miami — which needs to win on Saturday at Pitt and get plenty of help to reach the title game — is the only one ranked inside the top 15.

At least the math at the top of the ACC is pretty easy. If No. 18 Virginia fends off rival Virginia Tech and SMU avoids a pratfall at Cal, the two will meet at Bank of America Stadium on Dec. 6.

Even though the Mustangs are prohibitive favorites over the Golden Bears, who fired coach Justin Wilcox earlier this week, Lashee is wary.

“The hardest thing to do in sports is clinch or close,” he said.

Maybe in most cases. Perhaps not in this one.

If SMU or the Cavaliers, or both, lose, the hardest thing might be sussing out who makes the title game and explaining to the also-rans why they’re on the outside looking in.

The ACC put out an explainer this week outlining every scenario. It doesn’t take a degree in industrial engineering like Virginia coach Tony Elliott has to make sense of it, though it might help.

High stakes showdown for … third?

It’s telling of how weird a fall it has been for the ACC that perennial power Clemson has long been rendered an afterthought, and the marquee matchup on the final Saturday in November doesn’t involve the two teams with an inside track to the championship game.

If Miami can beat resurgent Pitt and freshman quarterback Mason Heintschel, there’s a chance the Hurricanes could receive an at-large berth to the CFP even without reaching the ACC championship thanks to a resume that includes an impressive win over Notre Dame in September and an emphatic response to a midseason swoon that has led the CFP to nudge the Hurricanes up in the rankings with each passing week.

Not that coach Mario Cristobal wants to talk about it.

While Cristobal allowed “it’s a really exciting time for college football,” he’s not in the mood to engage in what-ifs, even with the Hurricanes on the cusp of consecutive 10-win seasons for the first time since the swaggy, talent-laden groups of the early 2000s.

“Teams that take care of business, everything else takes care of itself,” Cristobal said. “Both teams are fighting for the same thing.”

It’s the same thing the ACC finds itself fighting for on a yearly basis: respect. Well, that and the hope that the CFP committee has a little short-term memory loss when it comes to figuring out the field.

As impressive as Miami has been of late by ripping off three straight victories by an average of nearly four touchdowns, it also has an overtime road loss to SMU and a mistake-filled upset at the hands of Louisville on its ledger.

Pitt’s hiccups came earlier and were even more pronounced.

The Panthers led West Virginia and Louisville in the fourth quarter in September and lost both times, leading Pat Narduzzi to bench Eli Holstein in favor of Heintschel. All the 18-year-old Heintschel has done since taking over is help Pitt occasionally put up video game numbers on offense while ripping off six consecutive ACC wins.

A cruel twist

There is an irony of sorts to the Panthers’ situation. If Pitt manages to find a way to upset the Hurricanes at home in the regular-season finale with a freshman behind center just like it did eight years ago, the Panthers might miss out on the ACC title game anyway because of the loss that doubled as the turning point in their season.

Head-to-head meetings are the first tiebreaker. But Pitt, SMU and Virginia didn’t play each other in the 17-team ACC. The next tiebreaker is winning percentage against common opponents.

Under those circumstances, the Panthers would be the odd team out in a three-way tie for first because of the loss to Louisville that led to Heintschel’s emergence. SMU handled the Cardinals easily last weekend.

“I’d like to sit here and say we were a 10-1 football team coming into this, (but) we didn’t, you know, finish a couple games the way we needed to,” longtime Pitt coach Narduzzi said.

Narduzzi is a proponent of supersized conferences maintaining divisions to sort things out rather than relying on inscrutable tiebreakers and hasn’t been afraid to vocalize his frustration with the process. Yet he also knows this is what everyone signed up for when leagues expanded in an effort to survive.

So no, Narduzzi has no plans to break out the spreadsheet and start running through the various scenarios required for Pitt to make it to Charlotte.

“We start worrying about other things out there, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “It won’t be talked about. It won’t be addressed.”

That doesn’t mean come Sunday morning, those “other things” won’t be felt in locker rooms across the country if they are the final arbiter in who receives a coveted title game or CFP spot versus who does not.

“I think there’s nothing worse than walking in a team room saying, ‘Sorry guys, we’re not going because we didn’t play that team or they didn’t play that team,” Narduzzi said earlier this month. “But it’s not my job. It’s what they did.”

___

AP Sports Writers Stephen Hawkins and Aaron Beard contributed to this report.

___

Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here and here (AP News mobile app). AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football