College football’s old conference championship model is fading fast, and Oklahoma is about to lose one of the last excuses it had left.
The College Football Playoff Management Committee confirmed Monday that the playoff will grow from 12 teams to 24 starting next season, a move that had been expected for months. Not long after that announcement, the SEC said this year’s championship game will be its last after a 35-year run. The Big Ten has already moved on from its title game as well.
For Oklahoma, that shift matters. At 5-4 overall and 3-3 in conference play in its third season in the SEC, the Sooners will not get the chance to go to Atlanta and play for a conference crown.
That was a regular part of life in the Big 12, where conference titles came almost every year and helped soften the blow of 26 years without a national championship. That safety net is gone now.
In the new setup, conference titles are basically just a path into the playoff.
The future of those championship games was already shaky, and now they look more like an extra hurdle than a destination. Their value has mostly been reduced to bragging rights and another trophy on the shelf.
More often than not, they’ve stood in the way of teams trying to reach the CFP. With the expanded format, the playoff will likely begin on the weekend that used to belong to conference title games.
The new bracket still gives automatic bids to the champions of the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC, but those spots will be earned through regular-season results in conference play. The playoff will also include the top-ranked Group of 6 champion and 19 at-large teams chosen from the final CFP rankings.
The top eight seeds will get first-round byes, while seeds 9 through 16 will host first-round games on campus. The higher seed will also host second-round games, which means 16 of the 23 playoff games will be played on campus. From the quarterfinals on, every game will be at a neutral site.
For Oklahoma, that leaves little room for anything less than the biggest goal. Conference titles and bowl streaks no longer mean much in this new world, so it’s national championship or nothing. Getting into a 24-team playoff should be the baseline for a program like OU, the same way the Sooners’ basketball teams are expected to reach the NCAA Tournament every year.
That standard, though, has not been met. Porter Moser has not delivered that on the court, and Brent Venables’ team would probably not make even a 24-team CFP this season unless the Sooners won out and slipped in. Venables also has not won a conference title at Oklahoma in either league he has coached in.
The point is that this change should not lower the bar. If anything, the bar should rise along with the sport.
It already feels like the standard has slipped over the past decade, especially during Venables’ five years in charge. Making the playoff can’t become something that earns a coach a contract extension; it has to be treated as the job itself.
Lincoln Riley built much of his Oklahoma legacy by rolling through a weak Big 12 and stacking conference titles before eventually falling in the first round of the CFP. That run of hardware, plus a few Heisman Trophy winners, helped fill the gap left by the Sooners’ long national-title drought since 2000. Venables does not have that cushion.
Now he has to navigate a much tougher SEC with no conference trophy to lean on. There is no ring unless Oklahoma is the best team in the country. Winning a national title has never been harder, with five huge games standing between a team and the trophy, but Venables has to keep up with the sport’s new reality if Oklahoma wants to stay in the blue-blood conversation.
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