With the expanded CFP eliminating conference championships, Missouri's Eli Drinkwitz and Wake Forest's Jake Dickert ask why conferences exist if there won't be title games

Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz and Wake Forest coach Jake Dickert are now asking a question about college football’s impending 24-team playoff era that might be on more and more people’s minds across the next 12 months. What’s the point of conferences without conference title games?

As part of college football’s move to double the size of the playoff field starting in 2027, conference title games will be no more. Since there are more teams and more games in the playoff, there needs to be more time available for the playoff. And with conference championship games typically occupying the first weekend of December, they were an easy cut from the schedule — especially as the playoffs are designed to bring in more cash.

“My question is why are we associated with conferences anymore if we’re not playing for a conference championship?” Drinkwitz rhetorically asked at his Tuesday news conference. “I mean, if the point now is just to be playing into a sea of 24 are we just doing it for scheduling affiliation? And if we’re just doing it for scheduling affiliation, are we — is there a reason to be flying all the way across the country for games from a national perspective?

“I think that’s where this conversation is going to end up leading to. I hate to be like that but I think the conference championship games are a natural byproduct of expanding to 24 being eliminated, but if you look back at the decisions that we’ve made in college football for the last six years and we’ve made them to where we’re at now — and I think you look back and now we’ve devalued some of the things that made college football so special.”

The SEC doesn’t have the cross-country travel that the ACC and Big Ten have put upon themselves with the demise of the Pac-12. After the West Coast league effectively folded at the end of the 2023 football season, the Big Ten’s footprint goes from Los Angeles and Seattle to New Jersey, while the ACC’s goes from Boston to Berkeley and Palo Alto.

Jake Dickert’s Wake Forest made one of those cross-country trips recently. His Demon Deacons played at Cal in October and blew out the Bears 41-7. He, too, wondered this week what would become of conferences now that champions aren’t going to be officially crowned on the field ahead of his team’s matchup against SMU. The game between Wake Forest and the Mustangs appears like it could go a long way to determining who will be in the final ACC title game.

“The new playoff format, I think obviously forces everyone’s hands into this,” Dickert said Monday. “I don’t know my feeling — I don’t like personally right now, you’re like man, all the championship games are going away. But at the end of the day, you can see why, right? Even this year. It can be an elimination game. Notre Dame doesn’t have to play [a conference championship game]. Or certain people don’t have to play those games.

“So there’s been a lot of situations — 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 that we’re going to have conference champions, why do we have conferences?”