This season will mark the last time that more care was put into choosing a conference champion than a national titlist. (That always seemed a case of pretzel logic, but that is — or at least was — college football for you.) The four-team College Football Playoff arrives in 2014, bringing with it a selection committee that will include everyone from Dan Radakovich to Condoleezza Rice, and the world will surely be better for it.
But what of the conference championships? With the CFP committee free to invite multiple teams from a single league, won’t league title games become more nuisance than necessity? If your record is such that you’ll almost surely wangle a playoff invitation, wouldn’t you rather not have an extra chance to lose? (Ask Alabama, which didn’t play for the 2011 SEC title but was crowned BCS champ.)
Come 2014, will conference championships have outlived their usefulness? The answer is no. First, conference championships are massive money-makers, and not many businesses choose common sense over cold, hard dollars and cents. But conference championships will continue to make football sense, which brings us to Reason No. 2.
With conference expansion has come dilution. Alabama’s SEC East opponents this season were bottom-feeders Tennessee and Kentucky. Missouri’s SEC West opponents didn’t include Alabama or Auburn. South Carolina didn’t play Alabama, Auburn or Texas A&M. Michigan State didn’t play Ohio State or Wisconsin.
The Pac-12 is the fairest league in the land, having moved to nine regular-season conference games plus a title tilt. The Big Ten will move to nine games in 2016. The Big 12 plays nine league games, but no longer a conference championship. Alabama coach Nick Saban is lobbying for the SEC to move to nine, but his proposal hasn’t gained traction. The ACC announced its intent to move from eight to nine games, but abandoned it.
Think of the continuation of conference championships as play-ins to the playoff. The committee will need every bit of evaluative information it can find, and head-to-head always is the best measure. The exact set of criteria for the College Football Playoff hasn’t been revealed, but surely a conference championship would be, if not a requirement, then certainly a desired commodity.
The heart of college football always has been its conferences. For those who think conference championships will become dinosaurs, I suggest this: Buy a ticket — if you can find one — to the doings in the Georgia Dome on the first Saturday of December and get there early. There is no better setting in college football than the hour before the SEC Championship game. If that ever goes away, the best part of the One True Sport will go with it.
