Earlier this week, the College Football Playoff Committee announced what Notre Dame football fans and fans across the country had been dreading. Starting next year, the CFP field will grow from 12 teams to 24, and several other changes will come with it. Among those changes is that the Autonomy 4 conferences will drop their conference championship games and instead determine their champions using a yet-to-be-determined tiebreaker format.
With A4 conferences set to eliminate their conference championship games, A4 coaches have started saying on the record that they don’t believe A4 conferences need to exist anymore. Meanwhile, Notre Dame fans are sitting around pointing and laughing and saying “exaaaactly” to all the people who used to claim that the Fighting Irish needed to join a conference as recently as last week.
Wake Forest head coach Jake Dickert was the first this week to make it clear he’s not sure why conferences, in their current form, need to continue in the 24-team College Football Playoff era.
“To not say we’re going to have conference champions, why do we have conferences?” Dickert asked. “I know there’s a lot of things that go into all that. It just feels odd.”
Notre Dame football looks ahead of curve as 24-team CFP weakens case for conferences
“I don’t like it, personally, right now… but at the end of the day, you can see why,” Dickert added. “It can be an elimination game… it can benefit a team like us. It can hurt a team like us… you can play all sides of the coin.”
Later in the week, Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz added his voice to a growing chorus of coaches wondering if Notre Dame had it right all along. Drinkwitz echoed Dickert’s main point but also expanded on why the current conference structure doesn’t make sense and hinders more than it helps.
"I think that's where this conversation is going to end up leading to. I hate to be like that but I think the conference championship games are a natural byproduct of expanding to 24 being eliminated, but if you look back at the decisions that we've made in college football for the last six years and we've made them to where we're at now — and I think you look back and now we've devalued some of the things that made college football so special."
Notre Dame has long felt there wasn’t a need for a conference for its football team. Now, some coaches are saying the same thing out loud, and Drinkwitz and Dickert won’t be the last.
There are even some schools like Miami that don’t want to be tied to a lesser conference and could decide there really isn’t any need to remain in the ACC and could go independent in the near future.
It feels like several side effects of this new college football world haven’t really hit yet. For quite a few of those potential effects, it feels like Notre Dame got ahead of the curve and will be better situated because of it.
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