Well Tom, I did look up the ACC tiebreaker rules and here's the ridiculous reality: Had the ACC used any other Power Conference’s tie-breaking system the league would have sent a different participant to the title game than Duke. Here's who would have played Virginia had the ACC been using the tie breaking systems of the other conferences. (interestingly each of the other conference tiebreak systems would have created a different opponent for Virginia--perhaps a reason for tie breaking to use a uniform system) Under the SEC's tie breaking system Virginias opponent would have been Louisville, Big Ten's--North Carolina, Big 12's--NC State, even the old Pac-12's — Clemson. In every one of those alternate formats, whoever won the ACC Championship game would be the ACC champion--and Virginia --or any of those four others would have outranked James Madison and officially taken the auto-bid-- and Notre Dame would have punched its ticket as an at-large. Happiness was that close!
The truth is simple:
Everything that happened was downstream from that single, avoidable, debacle caused by the ACC's convoluted tie-break fiasco. Now, all of the ensuing (and I say dangerous) national debate over whether the G5 should ever have any access to the CFP, never mind all of the vitriol and fury surrounding the Notre Dame snub--all the criticism and hand-wringing about the CFP format design — all of it--was triggered not by the playoff system or the committee, but by the ACC's idiotic tie/breaker which ended up choosing the one team the system could not process cleanly.
The CFP didn’t blow it.
The ACC did.