Shanna Lockwood-USA TODAY Sports
In the 12-team playoff era, we can already see, quite clearly, that the conference championship game is an outmoded thing. It can be used in certain situations, but if we have a situation in which one team clearly wins the conference in the regular season, that team has no business playing its 13th game in a conference title game. Oregon football should play its next game in a playoff quarterfinal as the No. 1 seed.
Similarly, in the SEC, Texas won the SEC in the regular season. The Longhorns should not be playing this Saturday. They should be declared SEC champion. They’re already in the playoff. Much like Oregon, why force Texas to play its 13th game now, and not in a quarterfinal?
The SEC Championship Game should be rebranded as the SEC Playoff (same for the Big Ten with Penn State playing Indiana and not Oregon).
The matchup this Saturday in Atlanta should be Alabama versus Ole Miss, two teams which both defeated South Carolina but did not play each other in the regular season. It’s an elimination game for the loser and a possible play-in game for the winner. Television would love this. It simply makes so much sense, and it’s wild that no one seemed to think ahead in planning for the 12-team playoff and the reality of what this new era would involve.
