Georgia safety Chris Smith has made three trips to the SEC championship game without winning one, so, for him, the stakes of Saturday’s title game against LSU at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium couldn’t be higher.
In a 12-team playoff, will anyone care who wins a conference title?
“There’s a lot of passion and emotion going throughout the building,” said Smith, a senior starter on the top-ranked Bulldogs (12-0). “You can feel the intensity.”
A question that now looms over college football is whether Thursday’s decision to fast-track expansion of the College Football Playoff from four teams to 12 will heighten or diminish the stakes and electricity Smith’s talking about — not only in the SEC championship, but conference championships across the sport.
After years of debate over how to expand the playoff — with eventual expansion largely a foregone conclusion, given the hundreds of millions to be made — clarity arrived Thursday after Rose Bowl officials dropped scheduling demands that had been an impediment.
The upshot, starting with the 2024 regular season, is a 12-team playoff in which the six highest-ranked conference champions will automatically qualify. The remaining six “at-large” spots will go to the next six highest-ranked teams.
As extra incentive to battle for that conference title, the four highest-ranked champions will be seeded 1-4 and get first-round byes. The next four highest-ranked teams (Nos. 5-8) will host first-round games.
Bill Hancock, executive director of the College Football Playoff, characterized it as a victory all around in a statement released Thursday.
“More teams and more access mean more excitement for fans, alumni, students and student-athletes,” Hancock said.
LSU Coach Brian Kelly, who in one season has transformed the SEC West-worst Tigers of 2021 (6-7, 3-5 SEC) into 9-3, 6-2 division champions, voiced similar enthusiasm during a video news conference Thursday.
Citing his roots as a Division II head coach (Grand Valley State, 1991-2003), Kelly said: “I just like more access. I think you get some playoff games on campus; you involve the bowl games; you keep them involved in it. I think it keeps more teams in the hunt as the season goes on in terms of vying for playoff spots.”
As for the prospect of a beefed-up national playoff diminishing the stakes of conference championships, Kelly was skeptical.
“I don’t think in any way it takes away from … the conference championships,” Kelly said. “We’ll see how that goes. That’s certainly up for discussion.”
Georgia Coach Kirby Smart said “only time will tell” before noting that questions abounded years ago about how a four-team playoff would impact conference championships.
Regardless, Smart said he felt the SEC Championship could never be diminished.
“If you go back in history and look at the game, the game has been extremely important to universities that play in it,” said Smart, 46, a former Georgia defensive back (1995-98). “There’s a certain level of respect that goes to the SEC champion. You’re playing for a championship of your conference. I think that’s a big deal.”
Saturday’s game marks the fifth time Georgia and LSU will have faced off in the SEC title game, testament to the respective schools’ rich recruiting bases and strong coaching tradition.
If a 12-team playoff were in play this season, 14th-ranked LSU would still have a shot at competing for the national title despite its three losses and a particularly poor effort in last week’s loss at unranked Texas A&M. All it would need to do is upset No. 1 Georgia on Saturday — a tall order against a team oddsmakers favor by more than two touchdowns.
In a similar vein, the national championship would still be in play for No. 9 Clemson (10-2) and No. 23 North Carolina (9-3), who’ll meet in Saturday’s ACC championship. The same is true for No. 11 Utah (9-3), which takes on No. 4 USC (11-1) in Friday’s Pac-12 title game. And No. 18 Tulane (10-2) and No. 22 Central Florida (9-3) would be vying for a playoff spot in the American Athletic championship.
Even without a path to the national championship at stake for LSU on Saturday, the game couldn’t mean more to Tigers running back Josh Williams.
“We had an upsetting season last year, a coaching change, everybody just giving us no credit. They had no expectations for us this season,” Williams said in a conference call this week. “Just for us to turn it around and actually get to the SEC championship is good for the school. It’s good for the football program and recruiting.”
Although his college career will have ended by the advent of the 12-team playoff, Williams said he saw only good in the fact that more teams will get a shot at the national title — particularly those that stumble early in the season.
Any way you game out an expanded playoff, the SEC is likely to dominate. Conference members have won the last three national titles: Georgia in 2021; Alabama, 2020; LSU, 2019.
In the view of SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, the league is stronger than ever — and that’s before Oklahoma and Texas join ranks in 2025.
Given that, Sankey said he anticipated three or four SEC schools would be represented in a 12-team playoff between the conference champion and the rankings-based at-large opportunities.
“Anytime you are a part of change, there are unknowns,” Sankey conceded of the variables in an expanded playoff. To that end, he and fellow administrators charged with proposing playoff formats spoke at length about how best to ensure conference championships remain important and not a mere prelude to the bigger prize to come.
In the case of the SEC, Sankey isn’t worried, saying the conference has created something “very special” in its tradition of crowning its champion amid the pageantry of Atlanta.
“There still is a need to determine a conference champion, just as we do in every other sport,” Sankey said. “I think there are a number of reasons why conference championship games will remain viable even as we go through this transition into an expanded playoff.”
Source: WP
