Playing 9 ACC games per season:
The ACC could count all 5 of the ACC vs ND games as league games, meaning they count toward the league standings for the ACC teams involved. That gives you 5 weekends of the season with an even number of ACC teams to schedule.
With byes, they should be able to schedule the other 4 games of odd number of ACC teams.
This also allows all ACC teams to schedule at least 1 P4 OOC game per season.
If Clemson wants to lock itself into playing ND and SoCar every year, that's on them. It's kind of weird that the Clemson-ND game counts as one of ND's 5-game ACC commitment, so everyone else in the ACC plays ND less often now.
Assuming ND is stronger than the average ACC team in the future, that makes Clemson's chances at making the ACC Championship harder. But they did this for TV $, obviously.
