Eli Drinkwitz is right, and the honest answer stings. If a conference championship doesn't gate playoff access anymore, conference membership in football is just a scheduling spreadsheet with a TV logo stapled to it.
Drinkwitz said it on Tuesday, November 10, after Missouri was eliminated from the SEC championship race. "My question is why are we associated with conferences anymore if we're not playing for a conference championship?" he asked. "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?" He still values what's being lost. "Do I think the conference championship games were a good thing? Yes, I do. I think they were great," he said. Wake Forest's Jake Dickert made a similar point around the same time.
The trigger is concrete. On November 9, the CFP Management Committee unanimously approved expansion to 24 teams starting with the 2027-28 season, bundled with a new ESPN media deal. The network agreed to pay an additional $1.7 billion over five years on top of the existing $7.8 billion contract that runs through 2031. The expanded bracket swallows the Power 4 title games whole. The SEC and Big Ten have both confirmed their December 2026 games will be their last ones ever. Nothing changes this season, which still runs under the 12-team format. The new setup kicks in next year.
Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti pushed hardest for the 24-team model, and ESPN's money dragged the holdouts across the line. The vote was unanimous, so every commissioner and Notre Dame's athletic director owns a piece of it. But the leader has a name, and so does the enabler. They looked at a format that made December appointment viewing and decided it was worth less than a bigger November inventory to sell.
If you want proof the championship game already stopped mattering, look at last season. On December 6, 2025, Alabama lost the SEC Championship to Georgia 28-7. Three touchdowns. The committee kept the Tide at the nine spot and sent them to the playoff anyway. Chairman Hunter Yurachek flat-out said the loss didn't move them: the "body of work" in the first 12 games carried the day. A team can get waxed in its conference final and march straight into the bracket. The title game was already decoration before anyone voted to abolish it.
Football isn't the only sport these schools play. In basketball, baseball, and everything else, conference membership and conference titles still carry real weight. But football pays for all of it, and football is what's being hollowed out. Nobody is realigning the country coast to coast for the volleyball schedule. UCLA isn't flying to Rutgers because the gymnastics bracket demanded it.
The tradition was real. The SEC invented the format in 1992, Alabama beating Florida in Birmingham, and the Big Ten didn't even adopt one until 2011. Those games meant something because they decided something. Petitti and ESPN just agreed to make them decide nothing, and they're counting on you to buy a ticket to the funeral in December and come back for the sea of 24 next fall.
