As college sports leadership has debated expansion of the College Football Playoff in recent years, one of the main points of contention has been the future of conference championship games. In a recent interview, Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne became one of the most prominent voices to presage the end of the tradition entirely.
Speaking with USA Today, Byrne offered a vision in which the CFP settles into a 16-team format that uses regular-season conference standings for automatic bids.
“It’s a great event,” Byrne said of the conference title game. “I don’t like the idea of it going away, but I think it’s reality, with an expanded playoff.”
Increased revenue from more CFP games would help offset the revenue from a potentially eliminated conference championship, Byrne told USA Today, adding that he is confident the SEC would be in a strong position for at-large bids to the tournament even without an end-of-season matchup to determine the at-large entrant.
“The top teams in the SEC are going to get in,” Byrne said.
During last year’s selection process for the final CFP bracket, committee members and analysts alike appeared to agree that conference championship games were losing relevance to a team’s resume for the Playoff. But they remain a strong TV property.
The past two SEC title games have drawn 16.6 and 16.8 million viewers, respectively, on ABC. They are a valuable part of the $3 billion package that ESPN pays the conference for.
Interestingly, these games have out-rated early-round CFP games in a fairly dramatic fashion in the first two years of the 12-team Playoff. Even Alabama’s first-round win over Oklahoma last year drew fewer viewers (14.9 million) than the SEC title game a few weeks earlier.
Byrne may be reading the headwinds accurately when he predicts the end of the conference championship games. But if they were to go away as a result of future CFP expansion, the business impact would be fairly significant.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.