As the second edition of the 12-team College Football Playoff approaches, the debate around the importance of Conference Championship games has rapidly heated up.<\/p>\n
This comes after Alabama<\/a><\/strong> suffered its third loss of the season in the SEC Championship Game, but couldn\u2019t be punished due to the fact that it did in fact make its conference championship game. Bubble teams that were left out of the Playoff, such as Notre Dame<\/a><\/strong>, Vanderbilt<\/a><\/strong>, Texas<\/a><\/strong>, and BYU<\/a><\/strong>, certainly used the three-loss argument to claim that Alabama<\/strong> shouldn\u2019t make the Playoff. Without a conference title game however, the Crimson Tide would have had just had two losses.<\/p>\n The same goes for BYU<\/strong>, which entered the Big 12 Championship Game against Texas Tech<\/a><\/strong> with just one loss (to Texas Tech<\/strong> earlier in the season). Without having to play the Red Raiders again, BYU<\/strong> would have had a strong at-large resume with an 11-1 record. At 11-2 however, they were slotted down to No. 12 below Notre Dame<\/strong>, who did not play in a conference title game.<\/p>\n Kirby Smart claims \u2018it\u2019s gonna be hard\u2019 to keep Conference Championship games<\/p>\n Georgia<\/a><\/strong> head coach Kirby Smart<\/a><\/strong> joined David Pollack<\/a><\/strong> on the latest edition of the \u2018See Ball Get Ball with David Pollack<\/a>\u2018 podcast to discuss whether or not there should still be Conference Championship games. Smart\u2019s Bulldogs just won their second consecutive SEC crown by downing Alabama<\/strong> 28-7 in Atlanta.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a tough one,\u201d Smart said. \u201cI was just talking about that. It\u2019s one of those, kind of, to each his own. I enjoy them and believe in them, but as the Playoff expands, it\u2019s gonna be hard. I just don\u2019t know how they\u2019re going to continue to do that, and they really need to move the calendar up. That would move the championship games out completely if that happens.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou have nine games and that? Because really now, you\u2019re talking about 10 games because you\u2019re gonna play nine and then you\u2019ve got the 10th for the Conference Championship. I think about the teams that didn\u2019t play that week. I talked to a lot of them and they were like \u2018we were working on the Portal and re-signing our players. We were getting healthy for the Playoffs.\u2019 And I\u2019m going man, we\u2019re playing for an SEC Championship, which is something nobody will ever be able to take away from us. But, there\u2019s an opportunity lost and cost on that.\u201d<\/p>\n While Conference Championship games are important for conference pride and bragging rights, they will be used to damage the resumes of teams that actually earned the right to play in them. With every single College Football Playoff spot being so coveted, the future of such games could be in serious peril.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the second edition of the 12-team College Football Playoff approaches, the debate around the importance of Conference…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":454933,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[1318,157718,1317,1315,1316,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-454932","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-kirby-smart-95-bainbridge","10":"tag-ncaa","11":"tag-ncaa-football","12":"tag-ncaafootball","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/454933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}