Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz used his Tuesday press conference to raise a pointed question about college football’s new 24-team playoff format: if conference championship games are gone, what is the point of conferences at all?
“Times are changing, so you’ve got to adjust with the times,” Drinkwitz said. “But my question is, why are we associated with conferences anymore if we’re not playing for a conference championship? If the point now is just to be playing into a sea of 24, are we just doing it for scheduling affiliation? If we’re just doing it for scheduling affiliation, is there a reason to be flying all the way across the country to play games from a national perspective?”
Drinkwitz isn’t the only coach asking the question. Wake Forest’s Jake Dickert raised similar concerns about large conference affiliations under the new structure.
“It can benefit a team like us; it can hurt a team like us. So, there’s a lot of situations. You can play all sides of the coin. But to not say we’re going to have conference champions, why do we have conferences? I know there’s a lot of things that go into all that. Just feels odd.”
Dickert added that the new playoff format “forces everybody’s hands into this,” saying plainly, “I don’t like it, personally. Right now, you’re like, ‘Man, all of the championship games are going away.'”
What Conferences Used to Guarantee
Until now, winning a conference meant an automatic playoff bid. For members of the Power 4 — the SEC, Big Ten, ACC, and Big 12 — conference play also meant a built-in schedule of ranked, elite opponents that helped shore up strength of schedule.
With teams now simply competing for one of 24 playoff spots, those old incentives look less essential. The top four seeds in the expanded playoff are still reserved for Power 4 conference champions, but with conference championship games eliminated, determining who that champion is reverts to the old voting system used before those games existed.
Notably, Notre Dame — which doesn’t belong to a conference at all — remains eligible for a top-four finish, a bye, and home-field advantage, undercutting the argument that conference membership carries special weight in the new system.
The Travel Question
Drinkwitz’s point about cross-country travel also carries weight. The ACC, Big 12, and Big Ten all have teams on both coasts, and while the SEC has no West Coast members, it has expanded considerably in the past five years. Coaches are now openly asking whether it makes sense to spend heavily on travel for conference games when a locally built schedule of ten competitive opponents could accomplish the same goal for far less money.
Those questions, largely unasked a few years ago, are now becoming part of the sport’s broader conversation as the playoff expands.
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