Elimination of Conference Championship Games Could Help Big 12

The college football landscape is evolving, and major changes seem to be happening regularly.

Over the past few seasons, the evolution of college football has only gotten faster. Along with the wild world of NIL and the transfer portal, the College Football Playoff has rumors swirling about its next form nearly every day.

Considering how important the College Football Playoff format is to the sport, just about everyone has something to say about how it does or doesn’t work. Among those who have ideas about how to fix the situation is CBS Sports’ Tom Fornelli. 

In a recent article, he explained a number of changes on how to help the sport and its ultimate event become much better in the near future. As it stands now, the 12-team playoff was popular in its first season, but there were plenty of flaws in the first year with an expanded field.

In Fornelli’s article, one of the changes he said he would make is to eliminate conference championship games. On the surface, this seems like an idea that will simply never happen from a revenue standpoint. Each major conference gets the final week to not only showcase its top teams at a neutral site, but also bring in fans from all around the country in person and on TV.

However, if the Big 12’s goal is to get more teams in, the conference should quickly jump at the idea. Considering where the Big 12 stands in this landscape, its top team each season might not break into the top 10.

Last season, the Cowboys had a conference championship between two teams that were ranked Nos. 15 and 16. Even if the conference could get those rankings slightly higher, the result of the title game would almost certainly result in knocking one of the conference finalists out of the playoff picture.

In a world without those conference championships, those teams would freeze at their rankings to end the regular season, and the Big 12 wouldn’t have to worry about the inevitability of one team knocking out the other.

After all these years, it’s certainly ironic that the Big 12’s best route to getting into the playoff would be to abolish the conference championship.