Eliminating conference championships will carry consequences

USA TODAY Sports is reporting that the college football schedule might drastically change in the near future, with the support of many coaches.

For starters, the College Football Playoff could expand to 24 teams. But a casualty of making that decision would be the elimination of conference championship games.

"Expanding the playoff is inevitable," New Mexico coach Jason Eck told USA TODAY Sports. "Getting the season completed earlier is crucial for the future of college football."

While something would have to give in order for this new world order to exist, losing conference championship games would come with its own consequences.

Historical comparison

"Because we've always done it that way" doesn't have to be a reason to keep things status quo, but college football already looks very different than it did 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.

Doing away with conference title games will further drive college football into a place that is virtually unrecognizable from anything fans have ever seen, and will make it difficult to assess the weight of a regular-season-based conference championship.

Finality of the conference schedule

Of course, it's easy to say that the team with the best record won the conference, but that might not mean as much as it once did. With power conferences essentially forming super leagues, teams do not play every other team in the conference every season. There's an imbalance that can cause one team to rise through the standings, and another to falter.

While a conference title game isn't the cure-all to that problem, it still gives the conference a chance to put the two best teams on the field in order to find out which one is actually superior. It might be anticlimactic for the Big Ten or SEC regular season slate to simply end, before heading straight into the CFP, for example.

Moneymaking showcase

All of this boils down to money, and college football as a whole stands to make a whole lot of it in an expanded playoff format. With that said, the conference title games bring their own appeal and pageantry to the table.

The 24th team in the CFP might not garner the same level of attention as a Georgia-Alabama SEC title game, for instance. There's also a decent chance that a conference title game pits rivals against one another, which is arguably better for the sport than a mix-and-match first-round CFP contest.

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This article originally appeared on College Sports Wire: CFP Expansion: Eliminating conference championship brings consequences