An expanded CFP can’t ruin conference championships when they’ve already lost their value

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From now until preseason camp starts in August, Land-Grant Holy Land will be writing articles around a different theme every week. This week is all about unpopular opinions. You can catch up on all of the Theme Week content here and all our “Unpopular Opinion” articles here.

As conferences like the Big Ten and ACC continue to tout their own unpopular opinion that the College Football Playoff should expand to 24 teams, the loudest critics of expansion tend to cite the probable elimination of conference championship games as one of their arguments. 

There are many reasons to argue against expansion, and I personally haven’t heard an argument in favor of expansion compelling enough for me to support it. From where I sit, it seems like fans and players alike have many concerns about how it would manifest. In my opinion, the two most compelling arguments are the ways in which it would undermine the regular season by allowing for more losses (which, in turn, means top teams like Ohio State would likely be willing to take a few losses to rest top players). There are pros (injury prevention) and cons (Draft ramifications) to this for players, and certainly for fans; it means lower stakes in the regular season. 

The second is the impact it would have on Cinderella runs in the playoffs. As it is, the physical nature of football makes Cinderella runs far more improbable than in its basketball counterpart, but pairing an SEC or Big Ten powerhouse with a four- or five-loss team that snuck in as a lower seed is going to lead to some boring football games. If Indiana was curbstomping Alabama and Oregon, imagine what they would have done to a 23- or 24-seed last season. It would not have been pretty. 

As it stands, then, I am against playoff expansion, at least until someone can answer for these very real problems with the idea. Still, of all the very valid reasons expanding the pool to 24 teams might not be a good idea, the heavily cited argument that it devalues the conference championship games is not one of them. 

The belief behind this argument is that a 24-team playoff would require so many extra games that conference championships would likely be eliminated altogether. This would, of course, be upsetting. But even if an expanded playoff (again, something I am against) eliminated conference championship games altogether, another expansion itself cannot be blamed for this devaluation. Rather, it’s speaking the quiet part out loud, an open admission of something that has been true for a few years: Conference championships lost their value when the playoffs expanded to 12 teams. 

I’m a traditionalist—I love the pomp and circumstance of college football. I live and die by Ohio State’s rivalry with that team up north (so much so that I unfortunately had to pass by Ann Arbor this week en route to a wedding in Detroit and blasted “We Don’t Give a Damn for the Whole State of Michigan” on loop the entire time). As such, it brings me no great pleasure to say the conference championship game is already dead, but the reality is, you don’t need to win your conference to make the playoffs, and you don’t need to win your conference to win the national championship.

When we look back to 2024, the first year of the 12-team playoff, Ohio State didn’t even make the Big Ten Championship. No one will remember that Oregon played Penn State or that Tez Johnson was named the MVP. They will remember that Ohio State won the national championship that year, however. Immediately and irrevocably, the game lost its importance. 

That’s not to say there will never be a time when the conference championship games matter in the 12-team system: Just ask Virginia, who would have made the CFP last season had they beaten Duke in the ACC Championship. It also matters in terms of its impact on seeding and bye weeks. 

Still, it’s unlikely that teams will continue to play for pride and pride alone even in the 12-team playoff. In years when games are essentially meaningless (both teams have all but locked in byes, for example), teams are going to shamelessly start resting top guys to prepare for the playoffs. Even worse would be if teams started sitting out altogether (something the conferences themselves would likely fine heavily for). 

The 24-team playoff wouldn’t fix any of this, but it hardly makes it worse. If teams are going to start treating conference championships as a scrimmage—which, let’s be honest, is where it’s already headed—then eventually our attachment to tradition is going to go the way of the dodo. We can hardly blame any future expansion for their cancellation when the writing is already on the wall as it is. 

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