Miami making CFP final diminishes importance of conference championship game

Think about this end to the 2025 college football season in the 2026 CFP championship game played Monday night. Miami, down six points with 1:42 left had the ball on its own 30-yard line with an outside chance to win a national championship against unbeaten Indiana.

The same Miami team that was left out of the ACC championship game due to a complex tiebreaker, rules that will undoubtedly be changed at this May's conference spring meetings in Florida.

The Hurricanes ultimately stumbled on their home field with a late turnover to seal their fate against the gutty Hoosiers, but college football is now all about the playoffs, even if that means ending the money-making conference championship games played the week after the regular season concludes.

Extra playoff games, however many, will also equal extra revenue down the road. It is always simply a matter of how long it takes until all stakeholders are content with their direct take and conference distribution models.

Can you even recall that Georgia Tech was the 2025 ACC football champion or which bowl game it played? Tech's postseason is certainly hard to remember, what with the four game showing by Miami defeating Texas A&M, Ohio State, and Ole Miss before falling to seemingly-destined Indiana. (FYI...Tech lost to BYU 25-21 in the Pop-Tarts Bowl.)

Change will be coming to how the ACC decides its football champion

The upcoming 2026 Syracuse football season will be the school's 137th overall, and, believe it or not, entering the 14th as members of the ACC (SU played 21 seasons of Big East football). The Orange have never sniffed late-season, conference championship game contention whether in the two-division format which ended in 2022, or the current single, 17-team standings in which (theoretically) the top two teams meet for the title.

If not for a multiple-layered tiebreaker that eventually took into account records of common opponents, a Miami-Virginia ACC championship game instead of Ga. Tech-UVA would have proffered an automatic CFB bid to the winner, but the 'Canes sweated out the final at-large bid over Notre Dame to have a chance to make their run to national runners-up.

For next season all tiebreakers will be more clearly defined and announced this spring, and that might be more challenging when you consider that the '26 season will be used to introduce the nine game league schedule for some teams (12 teams), while others (five teams) stay at eight games. All except one league team will begin playing nine games in 2027, but due to uneven math, one team will always play just eight ACC contests.

A 2026 CFP deadline is looming.

Negotiations over increasing the playoff field from the current 12 teams to 16, or even 24, stalled last weekend in Miami Beach, the Power 4 conference commissioners remain at an impasse over numbers and timelines, and specifically the Power 2 of the 4, are on different pages. The Big Ten wants to bump the field to 24, while the SEC wants 16.

Broadcast partner ESPN has a deadline of this Friday (Jan. 23) on an expansion agreement (voting is by all 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame) which is highly unlikely, so the field would automatically remain at a 12-team format. That would also ensure that conference championship games are on the calendar, including the ACC's 2026 game set for December 5 in Charlotte.

The six-year CFP contract with ESPN runs through the 2032 playoffs, and the number of teams in the field can be changed in any off-season during that period.

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