With future expansion of the College Football Playoff practically inevitable, a prominent athletic director says the SEC should get rid of its championship game.
“I think the ship has sailed. It’s run its course,” Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne told USA Today.
The SEC was the first major college football conference to establish a championship game in 1992. The brainchild of former commissioner Roy Kramer has become a tentpole event for the conference that brings in upward of $50 million in revenue annually.
Among the power conferences, the SEC title game has consistently been the most successful and lucrative.
But since the CFP expanded to 12 teams two years ago, the value of conference championship games and how they impact Playoff selection and preparation has come into question. Both SEC championship participants have made the Playoff in each of the past two years. As far as the CFP is concerned, the game has been for seeding. Same goes for the Big Ten.
In the ACC and Big 12, the championship games have been more impactful, with CFP participants being determined by the results of those games.
But Alabama’s loss to Georgia in last season’s game prompted debates about the Crimson Tide’s inclusion.
“It’s a great event,” Byrne told USA Today. “I don’t like the idea of it going away, but I think it’s reality, with an expanded playoff.”
Championship game results have presented a challenge to the selection committee in the first two seasons of the 12-team CFP, though they haven’t had a lot of impact on the final rankings that actually set the field.
Alabama’s ranking did not change after the Crimson Tide lost 28-7 to Georgia in Atlanta. The Crimson Tide entered the CFP as the ninth seed.
Championship games played on the first weekend of December also push back the start of the CFP and create unequal amounts of time off from the end of the regular season to the start of the Playoff for teams that compete for a conference title.
Eliminating championship games could allow the CFP to start and end sooner. Currently, the Playoff starts two weeks after conference championship games, a few days before Christmas, and ends in late January. Next season’s national championship game won’t be played until Jan. 25 in Las Vegas.
Oregon coach Dan Lanning was most vocal among many coaches who have called for a new CFP schedule, where the Playoff starts right after the regular season and wraps up earlier in January.
The CFP will remain a 12-team event this season after the Big Ten and SEC could not come to an agreement on an expansion plan. The SEC preferred a 16-team format, but the Big Ten would like 24 teams and would not agree to the smaller expansion without assurances that the conferences would continue to work toward an even bigger field.
The Big Ten’s plan would require the elimination of conference championship games, which is why it would take more time to implement. All the conferences have league title games baked into their television rights contracts. Getting rid of those games would require altering those deals with networks.
“Have people brought it up in our meetings to me, absolutely. I said: You need to slow down,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey told The Athletic last fall when asked about the possibility of the game going away. “There’s great meaning in being a champion of the Southeastern Conference. That means something among our culture, among our fan base. … I think there will be, just like last there has been in the past, ongoing dialogue. I understand the questions, and we want to be thoughtful on how we evaluate future directions, particularly when you have something that’s been so successful as what we’ve done with the football championship game.”
Byrne, who reiterated that he prefers expansion of the CFP to 16 teams, suggested replacing conference championship games with extra Playoff games could recoup lost revenue and content for television partners.
No matter how much CFP expansion comes next, eliminating championship weekend would allow the Playoff to start sooner.
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