Could college football move beyond conference championship games?

We have not seen the UCLA Bruins in a football conference championship game in over a decade, and with the expansion of College Football Playoffs, there’s a chance we won’t see it again.

It’s been since 2012 that UCLA football has appeared in a conference championship game. UCLA didn’t make a championship game appearance in the final 11 years of their time in the Pac-12 Conference and are so far 0-2 so far in the Big Ten Conference.

The American Football Coaches Association has voted to support the idea of a 24-team College Football Playoff, a move that would alter the timeline of the college football season if it were to come to fruition. With 24 CFP teams, what would be the point of a conference championship game?

For smaller conferences, the game would still be important but in the SEC or Big Ten, each school would be in the CFP and prioritize having a healthy team for a championship run rather than one win before the playoffs even began.

This isn’t to say that conference title games aren't fun, Indiana-Ohio State this past December was a terrific game, but both teams still got a first round CFP bye afterwards. The landscape of college sports has already changed severely over the past decade, it’s possible that conference championship games are just the next thing to be affected.

Matt Zemek of College Sports Wire made the case for moving past conference title games.

“If there are no conference championship games, those games get swapped out for bubble play-in games,” Zemek wrote. “We're not adding games to the schedule, only trading them. Teams that finish first or second in their conferences would not play these games; teams that finish fourth, fifth or sixth would play in them.”