The SEC remains committed to a conference title game, but for how long?

MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — SEC commissioner Greg Sankey left most of his answers open-ended Monday with the idea that specifics will be filled in following three days of meetings among the league’s coaches, athletic directors and presidents. But Sankey answered one question definitively.

Sankey was asked how committed the SEC was to its football championship game given the continuing discussion about enlarging the College Football Playoff format.

“We have contracts,” Sankey said, “So pretty committed.”

Asked if that commitment stretched beyond the league’s signed contracts with ESPN parent company Disney, Sankey dug in. 

“Yeah,” he said, “pretty committed.”

No matter what Sankey says, the question of whether to continue to stage the championship game will have to be addressed if the CFP gets bigger. Whether Sankey gets his desired number (16) or whether Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti gets his desired number (24), a tournament of either size renders conference championship games in the Big Ten and SEC irrelevant at best and a punishment for the leagues’ best teams at worst.

But Sankey, who has worked for the league since he was hired as an associate commissioner in 2002, would prefer to take more time to think about what comes next. The SEC has held its championship game since 1992. It was the brainchild of then-commissioner Roy Kramer, who used a little-known rule created (but not initially utilized) by the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference in the late ’80s. Bill Yoder, the former West Chester (Pa.) University AD, wrote the proposal that became the rule. “We were Division II,” Yoder told me for a Sports Illustrated story in 2014. “Nobody really cared.”

Kramer saw opportunity.  The SEC added Arkansas and South Carolina to get to the required 12 teams and then split into divisions. Alabama won the first title game in a thriller against Florida and then went on to beat Miami for the national title. The championship game became a signature event, and it’s currently worth between $75 million and $100 million a year to the SEC.

Other leagues followed, but not immediately. The Big 12 played its first title game in 1996, then discontinued the game after 2010 and brought it back in 2017. The ACC played its first title game in 2005. The Big Ten didn’t play a championship game until 2011, when Leaders Division champ Wisconsin beat Legends Division champ Michigan State.

This is a long way of saying the the other leagues don’t have as much tradition baked into their title games as the SEC. Plus, the other games haven’t been as financially successful*. That makes the ACC, Big 12 and Big Ten title games more easily expendable.

*Or as competitively successful. Texas upset Nebraska in the first Big 12 title game to knock the Cornhuskers out of national title contention, touching off a complicated relationship with the concept for that league. While the SEC’s game usually gave its best teams a boost, it was more of a mixed bag in other conferences.

Despite Sankey’s insistence on the league adhering to a media rights deal that runs through the 2033-34 academic year, the call has come from inside the house to reconsider playing the title game in the world of a super-sized playoff.

“I think the ship has sailed. It’s run its course,” Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne told USA Today last month when asked about the SEC championship.

Sankey will discuss myriad issues with his stakeholders this week, but this might be the thorniest among them. And that’s probably why, even after a hard line answer Monday, Sankey seemed to soften his position a few moments later.

“Even to the question about championship games, we have time for decisions about ‘Are we committed?’ We started and nobody followed immediately, it did over time, and it set us apart,” Sankey said. “So that’s not something you just walk away from, because in the moment there’s a little bit of pressure. You want to be thoughtful about how you do that, and I take that back to our view of the playoff.”

The championship game isn’t something the league would walk away from lightly. There probably needs to be a financial guarantee that any new revenue from the CFP could make the league whole.

Or perhaps there is a more creative way to reimagine that weekend. Sankey doesn’t want to add a round to the CFP. A 24-team format’s first round would simply take the place of championship weekend. But if the CFP went to 16 or if Sankey and Petitti can’t agree and it stays at 12? Maybe there’s a better way than forcing two teams who played unbalanced conference schedules (and who probably have already earned their way into the 12-team CFP) to bludgeon one another before the real tournament starts.

Maybe a doubleheader matching SEC teams on the bubble? Maybe a made-for-TV event matching teams from various conferences that are on the bubble?

Sankey is correct. Throwing out the old does no one any good without a replacement that adds value. But it’s time to start coming up with those ideas.