Get ready to mark the time of death. Conference championship games are about to be a relic of the past. News emerged Thursday that the College Football Playoff was nearing a deal to expand the bracket to 24 teams, just like everyone thought it would. That means more teams vying for the national championship, but it also means shortening the pre-playoff schedule in order to accommodate the extra postseason games.
Why a 24-team College Football Playoff threatens conference championship games
The first to go will be conference championship games. Those are typically played the first week of December once the regular season wraps up Thanksgiving weekend. With the new first round of the playoff expected to be around the second or third week of December, teams and conferences will most certainly opt for a week of rest between the final contests of the regular season and the playoff.
From a surface level, that's going to be a shame. Conference title games are some of the most fierce contests of the year outside of rivalry week, and they give players a winner-take-all opportunity to etch themselves into their respective league annals. Taking away the pageantry and competition will leave the conclusion of the regular season as rather deflated instead of momentum-building.
Granted, teams don't want to give their players more opportunities to hurt themselves and ruin their potential professional prospects, let alone postseason chances, by playing in what would be viewed as a 13th regular season game. Even if conference title games don't go away, coaches of teams that already have a lock on a top playoff berth will bench players to avoid catastrophe. That only cheapens the product for fans to close the year.
Eliminating conference title games won’t end CFP controversy
Additionally, losing conference championship games will evolve the argument complainers use about teams getting snubbed from the playoff bracket. It'll be difficult to defend the 25th team in the CFP Selection Committee's rankings, but without a game to determine the better of the top two programs in a conference, the debate will just shift there.
There is going to be the inevitable situation in which a conference's standings will finish with Team A in first place — best conference record — and Team B in second place — better overall record — but Team B will be ranked higher than Team A by the committee. Team B would, theoretically, get a higher playoff seed than Team A despite claiming the conference title. Is that really fair?
Some will argue that's exactly what the committee was designed to decide, and the final rankings and seedings should be respected. That's not going to stop the potential national discourse, as we all experienced last year with Notre Dame being left out over Miami (neither of which played in a conference title game) and a three-loss Alabama (who earned that third loss in the SEC title game). This 24-team plan to tame the chaos is only going to create more of it.
CFP expansion should cost college football a nonconference game instead
The solution would be simple. Cut a non-conference game from the start of the season as to prioritize conference play. Programs that decide to schedule FCS-exclusive or zero power conference foes should be penalized in the committee's eyes because that should weaken the value of their schedule and their record. Conference championship games get to stay and the SEC can quit whining about having to play nine conference foes just like the rest of the sport.
The CFP can easily avoid another headache here but it's clear the top brass of the sport -- the SEC and Big Ten -- want to create the cushiest paths possible for multiple of their members to qualify for the 24-team bracket. Less difficulty means less opportunity to stumble, and if someone does anyways, well, that's on them. Let teams duke it out on the gridiron for their league trophies like a proper sport.
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