Let's go bowling in 2007

 College football is always ripe for a hypothetical, and the ACC has given us a good one. Duke, at 7-5 overall, finished in a five-way tie at 6-2 in conference play with Miami, Georgia Tech, Pitt, and SMU. The Blue Devils will face Virginia in the conference title game, the Cavaliers' appearance coming with two conference losses of their own, except only one that counted, because their loss to N.C. State was not a conference game.

Things used to be much simpler, right? Well, here's the hypothetical: what if we went back to 2007 conference alignments, sending Pitt back to the Big East and SMU to Conference USA's West division? As we bring back divisions to the ACC, we find that Miami, Georgia Tech, and Duke all were in the Coastal... where they would be tied for second behind Virginia.

So, the Cavaliers' opponent for the conference championship game would not be one of the teams that went 6-2 against the 2025 ACC, but the champion of the Atlantic... which finished with a three-way tie at 4-4 between Clemson, N.C. State, and Wake Forest.

These teams did not all play each other, so to break a tie, we would go to their common opponents: Duke, Florida State, Georgia Tech, and North Carolina.

Wake Forest was 1-3 against these opponents, Clemson was 2-2, and that meant Saturday's rivalry game between Carolina and State would have been the game that put the Wolfpack, at 3-1 in the common games, in Charlotte for a rematch against Virginia of their nonconference game, in the conference title game.

You've got to feel for SMU, which would have finished second to Tulane in CUSA West, having to watch Tulane go face East Carolina in a conference title game. Texas Tech, 8-1 in conference play, would get the nod from the Big 12 South over Texas A&M, whcih went only 7-1, and gone on to play 8-4 Iowa State, in with a tiebreaker over Kansas State -- their head-to-head game in Ireland to start the season.

The SEC would still be Georgia-Alabama. Some things you can't change even in an alternate reality.

The reason I chose 2007 was because I was looking at the old conference bowl tie-ins, and presumably in a BCS world, we'd get the Big Ten and SEC champions in the title game, with a disgruntled Texas Tech if Alabama got in over them, but that's what it would be. We'd have Oregon against Indiana or Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, too. Imagine that. Some other matchups that could come together only the in the imagination world of 2007 bowls: Texas A&M-Vanderbilt in the Cotton Bowl, BYU-Arizona State in the Las Vegas Bowl, Iowa State-Arizona in the Sun Bowl, and Iowa-Tennessee in the Outback Bowl because, again, some things you can't change even in an alternate reality.