When the 12-team College Football Playoff was announced, it came with a couple of key goals. Among them was to reframe the focus on conference championships and truly reward teams that reach the pinnacle. Five conference champions are guaranteed spots in the field, after all.
In the first year of the system, conference championship games have delivered in a big way. Friday's Mountain West Championship Game will kick off the best weekend of conference championship games in history. The Mountain West and Big 12 are playing win-and-in games. In the ACC, Clemson (Clemson!) must upset SMU to make the field. Even for the SEC and Big Ten, the winner will earn a pivotal bye, while the loser will have to play 17 games just to win a national championship.
For the first time since 2006, there are no conference championship games with a betting spread of a touchdown or more. That year, there were five title games. This year, there are nine. The widest lines come in the AAC and Sun Belt, where Tulane and Louisiana are 5.5-point favorites against Army and Marshall, respectively. Every power-conference title game sits at 3.5 points per closer.
It should be a celebration of the new system, but thanks to some poorly timed comments from CFP chair Warde Manuel, the weekend is instead at risk of being a mockery.
Heading into Sunday's final CFP Rankings, No. 8 SMU sits firmly in the field, projected as the ACC champion and seemingly safe even with a loss. But make no mistake about the historical significance here: the Mustangs hope to win their first major conference title (in their first year as ACC members, no less) since before the Death Penalty of the 1980s.
But on Tuesday, Manuel was asked on a media call whether the Mustangs were at risk of falling behind No. 11 Alabama should they lose against No. 17 Clemson in that ACC title game. Would, say, SMU go from a first-round bye to missing out on the 12-team field completely?
"Potentially yes," Manuel said. "And they can move above teams as well. Again, it just depends on the outcome of the game."
Wait ... what?
The Mustangs, 11-1, are playing for a conference championship in a league where they finished undefeated in conference play. No. 9 Indiana, also 11-1, is not. And No. 11 Alabama isn't even close after going only 5-3 in conference play and losing a full quarter of its games. Suddenly, earning the honor of playing for a title is a competitive disadvantage?
Palm: How might the CFP Selection Committee judge conference title game losers?
Granted, the previous system certainly punished teams at times for failing to win their conference title game. Seven times since 2014, a title game loser fell out of the four-team field. In almost every case, though, a conference title game loser was replaced by a conference champion. Five times, they were replaced by the actual head-to-head winner of that game.
That's not the scenario here. If SMU loses to Clemson, the Mustangs will be compared to non-champions and teams who only played 12 games.
Incentivizing teams to miss conference championship games degrades the entire sport. A conference title game is a 13th data point, and data points can be negative. At the same time, the CFP committee should think long and hard about just how negative a data point should be to offset a team that didn't even earn that 13th data point.
By every measure, playing for a championship should be an honor and only a way to cap off a great season. The Mustangs, for example, would be the first team to transition up to a power conference in the BCS/CFP era and win the league.
"If our team all got COVID today and didn't play, we're in," SMU coach Rhett Lashlee told On3's Andy Staples. "We're in, right? We don't have another data point to drop us below anybody that's behind us ... I think if you open up that door, you're going to see a lot of people do a lot of crazy things."
Lashlee is simply trying to lobby for playoff seeding, but this is the worst thing imaginable to hear from the coach of a championship-caliber team. If SMU can't even enjoy an opportunity to win the ACC without feeling the pressure of an anvil sitting above its head, that's disastrous for the sport.
Of course, the committee needs to maintain its flexibility. If a conference finalist loses 59-0 and loses a key player, it matters. There's no reason to lay the groundwork for screwing over a team before it happens, though. If one good team loses a close game to another good team while the rest of the sport is idle, it would be disastrous for that to suddenly backdoor a far less deserving team.
The 12-team College Football Playoff has electrified the sport and created more meaningful games than nearly any year in history. When the final CFP Rankings are released, the committee needs to think about the precedents they want to set. If they want to incentivize conference championships once more to open up the sport, they need to prove it on Sunday.
