Alabama AD Greg Byrne suggests ending conference championship games: 'I think the ship has sailed'

The Crimson Tide lost 28-7 in the SEC title game last season, but still made the playoff

Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne became the most recent administrator to come out against conference championship games. Despite appearing in 10 of the last 14 SEC title games -- including the 2025 version -- Byrne believes that the competition has outlived its usefulness. 

"I think the ship has sailed," Byrne told USA Today. "It's run its course. ... It's a great event. I don't like the idea of it going away, but I think it's reality, with an expanded playoff." 

Conference championship games are a relatively new invention in the history of college football. The SEC started playing one in 1992, after the league added Arkansas and created divisions. When Texas and Oklahoma joined the league, divisions went away, but a title game remained. 

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At this point, every FBS conference plays a conference title game on either the final Friday or Saturday before the College Football Playoff's Selection Sunday. The games are especially consequential at the power conference level, where the winner is vying for an auto-bid to the CFP. 

However, many have started coming out against the games in recent years. Lane Kiffin made headlines at Ole Miss in 2024 by saying that coaches would rather not play in the game, even with a potential bye on the line. More scrutiny appeared, too, after Virginia lost a potential auto-bid to the College Football Playoff in the ACC Championship Game, opening the door for Sun Belt champ James Madison to get in instead. 

Alabama lost 28-7 in the SEC Championship Game last season, causing them to sweat their spot in the College Football Playoff. They ultimately got in, beating Oklahoma before getting blasted 38-3 by No. 1 Indiana. 

Impact on the calendar

When the College Football Playoff National Championship kicks off next season, it will be Jan. 25, 2027. That will make it the latest national title game in history and slot it deep in the midst of the NFL playoffs. Amazingly, it will take place a full 51 days after conference championship weekend, an embarrassingly long gap. 

The layoff has been a brutal one for teams to earn a first-round bye in the CFP. Seven of the eight teams to earn a bye have gone on to lose their first playoff game, a trend only bucked by reigning national champion Indiana. While no coaches have explicitly pointed to the nearly four-week layoff for those teams, several sources have acknowledged that it's a complication. 

If conference title games disappeared, it would give the sport far more flexibility in trying to get the postseason done before mid-January. As it stands -- and with expansion on the horizon -- it's getting dangerously close to competing with the Super Bowl. 

President Donald Trump recently released an executive order establishing that no college football game is allowed to impede on the exclusive window for Army-Navy. However, several administrators have expressed willingness to work around that. 

What really killed the title game

The real killer of conference championship games isn't the expanded playoff -- it's bloated conferences. After the most recent realignment, every power conference has at least 16 members. In the case of the SEC, teams have only played eight out of the 15 teams in their conference each year, though that will rise with the move to a nine-game conference schedule. 

With 16 teams finagling over eight games, tiebreakers have become an embarrassingly complex pathway to decide who even plays for a conference championship. Last season, for example, four teams tied with 7-1 records in SEC play. Despite being the worst of the bunch by numerous metrics, Alabama earned a spot in the title game by virtue of its tiebreaker.

That pales in comparison to Duke emerging as the worst of five 6-2 teams in ACC play to vie against Virginia in the ACC title game. After an upset victory over Virginia, the league failed to even earn one of the five conference championship tiebreakers. Of course, Miami was actually the highest-quality team in the ACC, reaching the national title game. 

Conference championship games used to be an opportunity for the best and brightest in each league to showcase themselves on the national stage. In the world of bloated conferences, successfully finding the best and brightest has been a fool's errand.