Conference championship games have been dealt a death blow. They may not fall immediately, but make no mistake. They’re dead. The body is just convulsing.
That was made clear Sunday during ESPN’s College Football Playoff Selection Show. The committee’s decision may have been designed to protect the sanctity of those games. Alabama, despite racking up a third loss, was not excluded from the playoff because that loss came in the SEC Championship Game, but Miami also wasn’t excluded, despite not being good enough to make their own conference title game, and the winner of said game not getting into the playoff, so what the hell does that mean?
I know. It’s a lo,t and it’s exhausting.
Maybe that is why the College Football Playoff Committee is ready to be done with these games. ESPN certainly is. Financially, they’re valuable additions to the network’s content calendar, but the way the stars of their playoff selection show were talking before and after the field was revealed, it was clear that, from a football standpoint, conference title games have lost their appeal.
Greg McElroy suggested that the results on the field should be entirely thrown out and that conferences should shoehorn the two teams they consider the best into their title game every year. Rece Davis used the term “bonus game” over and over to refer to Alabama’s loss to Georgia and Ohio State’s loss to Indiana. Neither man said plainly that conference championship games were bad or needed to go, but they were sending a message: these games have outlived their usefulness.
We were always headed this way, going back to the Big Ten’s proposal this summer that the power leagues all have multiple automatic bids to an expanded postseason. If your conference’s number four team is guaranteed a spot in the postseason, why would we bother playing to determine who is number one and who is number two?
It’s too bad. Conference championship weekend is the one weekend that college football fans have an actual communal viewing experience, especially on Saturday. We all watch the Big 12 game at noon. We all watch the SEC game at 4. We all watch the Big Ten game in prime time and flip to the ACC game during commercial breaks.
That should mean something will step up to fill that void if championship games go away. Might ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips have stumbled onto a solution in January when he suggested that winning the league in the regular season should be enough and the extra game should be to strengthen the resume of the teams seeded two and three? The stakes wouldn’t be as high, but it would be something.
We may be debating which model is correct, but the College Football Playoff is most certainly expanding. That’s not news to anyone. No matter how many more games you create, you cannot generate more days, so something is going to have to go if we want the new postseason to work within (or relatively within) the calendar. Conference championship games are the obvious candidate, but under the current model, it will require each conference to come to that conclusion on its own.
Nick Saban can pine for the sport to have a commissioner. Others can pine for Saban to be that commissioner. If you know ball, you know that’s never going to happen. If there is any silver lining, it’s that the CFP may have to force a level of cooperation and cohesion that the power conferences have been resisting for decades to make any kind of expansion work.
About Demetri Ravanos