TAMPA, Fla, — Four flags whip in the Baton Rouge breeze atop the north endzone.
Old Glory is one, and the other three boast LSU’s national championships. The SEC titles don’t fly a flag. The Tigers have won a dozen, including four conference championship games in Atlanta.
Roy Kramer concocted the cash cow that is the SEC Championship Game back in 1992. It grew from a controversial contest in Birmingham on a chilly December day to a monster event that has reshaped college football’s postseason picture.
But for how much longer?
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey was asked about the game on Monday morning and gave a tepid response.
“I think even the move to 12 has created pressure around championship games,” Sankey said. “We’ve talked through the factors that support the pro list, and we’ve talked about some of the con list, the negatives that need to be considered. And we have some time. We will have a conference championship game the first Saturday in December. We have contracts and plans in place well beyond that. But we have time for consideration. One of the factors for us is what will happen with the College Football Playoff.”
One way to look at the conference title game is to frame it as an opportunity to win college football’s most rugged league. The other is to view it as another chance to lose a game.
Alabama’s 28-7 drubbing at the hands of Georgia last December didn’t cost the Tide a thing. Alabama entered the game ranked No. 9 and emerged in the same spot, safely in the College Football Playoff. That evidence doesn’t appear to have impacted the thinking of the SEC coaches. Missouri’s Eli Drinkwitz said Monday that the league’s coaches already regret the move to nine games with another power four game mandated by the league office.
The two SEC teams that reach Atlanta this year will play 11 games against power conference competition. Some teams they’re competing with for playoff seeding will play nine.
In a subjective postseason format, there’s no guarantee how that will be weighed by the committee.
I sat in the Georgia Dome press box when Tyrann Matheiu electrified the crowd twice weaving through a wake of Georgia Bulldogs in 2011. I was in the student section when Johnathan Zenon picked off Eric Ainge to seal LSU’s 2007 victory that capped maybe the wildest day in LSU football history.
Matt Mauck’s 2001 heroics and Joe Burrow’s 2019 magic will live in LSU lore forever, but dissolving the conference title game might be practical, especially if it allows the playoff to move up a week to condense what has become an absurdly long football season.
The dollars will have to make sense for the league to abandon the $80 million dollar revenue generator. That’s easier said than done. Increased media rights from a nine-game conference slate and expanded 12-team College Football Playoff will help.
If Sankey polls his football coaches, they’ll vote the game down in an instant. The only vote that matters, though, is the commissioner’s. He didn’t ask me, but I’d be fine scrapping it. I’d probably do the same with the bowls. They’ve all outlasted their relevance as the sport focuses on the CFP.
Ten years ago, I would have never seen this coming, but the landscape of collegiate athletics has shifted more in the last decade than any other era.
The next move might be doing away with one of the league’s proudest traditions.
