No Conference Championship Game? Not a Problem for the Big XII

One of the biggest misconceptions in the major college football world is that the Big XII is a weaker overall conference due to their lack of a championship game and that the lack of a championship game will hurt Big XII teams aspiring to make the College Football Playoff. In fact, without a championship game, how can the Big XII have a true champion? What if the title ends in a tie?

The answer is obvious, though. The Big XII, in fact, is the only major conference with a true champion. Every conference game matters. The league has ten teams and plays a full nine-game round-robin schedule. Everyone plays everyone. There is no need to worry about unbalanced schedules or unfair cross-divisional games. There are no cross-divisional games. Everyone plays everyone and the best record wins. It’s as simple as that.

The stigma against a major conference without a championship game is outdated. After the SEC started playing a championship game back in 1992, other major conferences soon followed. The one notable exception was the Big Ten. The Big Ten had 11 teams and wasn’t changing that, so they could not have a championship game. Since the Big Ten did not play a full round-robin, not every team played everyone else. This could lead to awkward scenarios where there is a tie for the conference title and no real head-to-head way to break it. It could also lead to the even more awkward case of two teams in the conference finishing undefeated, as happened in 2002.

None of this should matter to the Big XII, though. The Big XII will always have a true champion. And sure, ties can happen. But a three-way tie, for example, in the Big XII overall is no different than a three-way tie within a division to play in the conference champion game. Each conference has their own tiebreaker procedure for division champions. The Big XII has the same for their overall champion. The principle is identical; the scale is just a tiny bit larger.

As major conferences get bigger and bigger, overall conference titles mean less. Sure, winning a 16-team conference is bigger than winning a 10-team one, but it’s a different type of win. With the other four power conferences at 14 teams each, teams will play some of their “conference rivals” twice a decade (more often in the Pac 12 because they play a nine-game schedule).

The fact is simple–as divisions in power conferences get bigger, each division is basically becoming a mini-conference all on its own. Divisional games in these four conferences are now a full half of the season schedule. Each division begins to take on its own personality. What used to be called “SEC dominance” can definitely, at the moment, be referred to as “SEC West dominance”. The ACC Coastal is perhaps the most wide-open division out there.

And as divisions get bigger, there are fewer games left on the schedule for cross-divisional play. And while this makes conference connections weaker, it does have a slight benefit of lowering the impact of cross-divisional SOS. It is less likely now for a team to have an inordinately difficult (or unfairly easy) cross-divisional schedule, but the fact remains that unbalanced schedules can make for unfair ways to win a conference. Can you imagine if the difference in the SEC West ends up being that the winner got Vanderbilt and Kentucky in cross-divisional play instead of Missouri and Georgia? Also, statistically speaking, the bigger a conference is the more likely it is that the top two teams are from the same division.

In the “What have you done for me lately?” world of the BCS, not having that huge-profile conference championship game in the first week of December could really hurt a team in the polls and the national perception. But the CFP selection committee should be above that. They have all year to take stock of these teams and see who deserves to go where. They hopefully won’t be influenced by one week in December more than the rest of the year. Especially since, in conferences like the ACC and SEC this year, it looks like conference championship games won’t even involve the top two teams from the conference.

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