College Football: A brief history of the conference championship game

25 years ago, the concept of a conference championship game was a novelty. This year, for the first time ever, every FBS conference will hold a title game.

For much of college football history, conference championships were decided on the field through the series of regular-season games against every other league member. Conferences were small enough that playing every other team in the league was easily manageable, while still leaving open opportunities to play opponents from other conferences over the course of the season. The idea of hosting a conference championship game was never really worth considering.

Then, just over a quarter-century ago, the first conference championship game came online as the Southeastern Conference took advantage of an obscure proposal from a pair of Division II conferences by expanding and splitting into two divisions. That allowed the SEC to stage the first title game in 1992 between division winners Alabama and Florida.

For decades, the conference championship game has evolved from a southern oddity to a nationwide phenomenon. Over time, every major conference has come to adopt the idea and put it into practice.

And this season, the takeover of conference championship games becomes complete when the Sun Belt championship game goes online and all 10 FBS conferences play a 13th game between division winners (or, in the case of the Big 12, their two best teams in the round-robin standings).

With title games on the horizon in the upcoming week of games, this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback gets ready for the week ahead by looking back across the past quarter-century of college football history to show how conference title games have been perceived over time. From a curiosity to a must-have, the conference championship game has become a mainstay of college football in a relatively recent time frame.

1992: The SEC launches the first conference championship game

These days, title games are omnipresent. Not making the big showcase is not necessarily a death sentence, as Alabama showed in both the 2011-2012 BCS season and the 2017-2018 College Football Playoff. But they are a reliable litmus test for separating the best teams of the country from the also-ran.

It must be noted, however, that the first conference championship game was not without its controversy. When the SEC opted to invite Arkansas and South Carolina into the fold for the 1992 season, the motivation was simple and obvious.

The plan started two years earlier, when SEC presidents came together at spring meetings and voted to expand to at least 12 teams. They hoped to capitalize on a 1987 policy shift sponsored before the NCAA by two Division II conferences, the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association and the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference, that allowed teams to split into two divisions and host a conference championship game.

There was talk about inviting in everyone from Florida State, Miami, Texas, Texas A&M, and Arkansas. The possibility was on the table to launch the first superconference in addition to the first league title game. Instead, only Arkansas opted to leave the Southwest Conference, while Florida State went to the ACC and Miami helped launch the Big East as a football conference. To get to 12 teams, the SEC invited in independent South Carolina to round out the numbers.

As Malcolm Moran noted in his December 3, 1992 column in the New York Times, “It would be unfair to characterize the game as the Greed Bowl, because this lunge for added revenue has more to do with desperation than selfishness.” The game would bring in millions of additional income for the conference, at a time when the NCAA was uninterested in forming a Division I-A playoff and the Bowl Coalition was only just coming online to try to fill that void.

The Gators, the 8-3 champion of the SEC East, had the opportunity to throw a wrench in the Coalition’s hopes of matching a pair of undefeated teams in the Sugar Bowl. Alabama prevented a doomsday scenario by winning 28-21 against Florida in the inaugural SEC championship game at Legion Field in Birmingham.

The Crimson Tide went on to face Miami in the Bowl Coalition’s national championship pairing at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. Miami was the heavy favorite in the showdown of undefeated programs, but Alabama held the Hurricanes to 13 points and only 48 rushing yards. Heisman winner Gino Torretta completed less than 45 percent of his passes and threw three interceptions for the Hurricanes as Alabama claimed the national title 34-13.

In the process, the win by Alabama prevented the conference championship game from becoming an albatross around the neck of the SEC. The game would prove lucrative over the next few years, moving from Legion Field after the 1993 game to the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. Florida and Alabama matched up in each of the first three editions of the game, with the Gators winning the latter two titles in 1993 and 1994.

Arkansas edged out Alabama in 1995 for a chance to lose to Steve Spurrier‘s side. The win over the Razorbacks gave Florida three consecutive SEC crowns, the first time since Bear Bryant’s 1970s Crimson Tide teams that an SEC school won three straight conference titles.

1996: Big 12 is born, starts title game alongside expanded WAC

Florida would go on to win a fourth consecutive SEC crown in 1996 en route to a national championship. But the big story in 1996, as it pertained to conference expansion and the launch of new championship games, related to the death of one conference and the enrichment of two others.

After Arkansas left for the SEC in 1992, the Southwest Conference lumbered along as an all-Texas league for the next three years. As early as December 1993, though, athletic directors were going anonymously on the record to the Houston Chronicle to confirm nascent discussions between the remaining SWC schools and the Big 8 about the possibility of a merger.

“This is a solid option,” one athletic director noted about the possibility. “I certainly wouldn’t say it’s pie in the sky. It’s a viable option.” Even at that early date, any possible merger looked likely to shut out Houston, Rice, TCU, and SMU from the new league. Talks heated up further at the 1994 NCAA convention in San Antonio, and by 1996 the SWC was dead.

In its place, the Big 12 came online with the eight teams from the Big 8 and Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor joining from the remnants of the SWC. Oklahoma and Oklahoma State joined the Lone Star schools in the South Division, while the rest of the Big 8 formed the North Division. It took time to nail out the details, and the league finally came online for football in 1996.

The four castaways of the SWC were left to find new homes, and they were welcomed in by several different leagues. Conference USA absorbed Houston in the course of the new league’s formation from the merger of the non-football Metro Conference and the Great Midwest Conference that brought together several longtime football independents in 1996.

The majority of the Big 12 rejects, though, were brought into the fold of the Western Athletic Conference. Formed in 1962 by the merger of the Border Conference and Skyline Conference, the WAC had slowly grown into the preeminent mid-major conference in the country. Along with Rice, TCU, and SMU, the WAC also incorporated UNLV and San Jose State from the Big West along with independent Tulsa.

With the Big 12 at a dozen teams and the WAC expanding to 16 members, the two leagues joined the SEC in hosting a conference championship game. It was not universally popular, as Moran noted in the New York Times. The issue, Moran noted in his weekly column on August 27, 1994, was that teams “will somehow have to ration their energy” in Thanksgiving rivalry games because “any hope for a national championship would next hinge on the outcome” of the various conference championship games.

That fear came to fruition for the Big 12. Squaring off in St. Louis, 7-4 South champion Texas pulled off the upset the SEC had feared in 1992. The Longhorns were down 24-23 against No. 3 Nebraska entering the final quarter and went down 27-23 on an early field goal in the final frame. But 120 rushing yards and three touchdowns from Priest Holmes on the ground, coupled with a 353-yard passing day from James Brown, allowed Texas to score the final two touchdowns and pull clear for a 10-point takedown of the Cornhuskers.

The WAC avoided a similar situation, as the league’s first conference championship game featured a pair of ranked teams with one-loss records against one another. Wyoming, in Joe Tiller’s final season at the helm before departing for Purdue, entered the contest ranked No. 20 in the country. BYU, sitting at No. 6, had already gone 12-1 before their showdown against the Cowboys. With the contest going to overtime in the first season playing under the Kansas rules, the Cougars prevailed 28-25 and earned a game against No. 14 Kansas State in the Cotton Bowl.

1997: The MAC expands to form its own championship game

A year after the Big 12 and WAC championship games came online, the Mid-American Conference became the fourth league to launch a conference championship game in football. The MAC, one of the most stable conferences in the country since its 1946 formation, grew to 12 teams in 1997 by inviting two former members back into the fold.

Northern Illinois spent 11 seasons in the MAC between 1975 and 1985, before drifting away to independence and a three-season stint in the Big West. By 1997, the school and the league decided to partner back up.

The other team to come back into the fold, Marshall, had a strange history after leaving the MAC after the 1969 season. In 1970, the Thundering Herd had just left the MAC when the crash of Southern Airlines Flight 932 took out the team on their return from East Carolina. Independent for most of the 1970s, the Herd joined the Southern Conference in 1977 — right before the split of Division I into two subdivisions.

When the Southern Conference opted to transition to I-AA in 1982, Marshall went down as a result. Over the next decade and a half, the Thundering Herd dominated the I-AA level, winning national championships in 1992 and 1996. When they moved back up to the I-A level in 1997, the Thundering Herd became the first and only program ever to win a I-AA national championship one year and then a conference title in their first I-A season.

(Transition rules have since prevented the possibility of another team repeating Marshall’s unprecedented run. Barring other rules changes that open the possibility back up, Marshall will always be the only team to pull off the feat.)

An article in the September 19, 1997 Chronicle of Higher Education detailed the rise of the Bowl Alliance and the impact of the 1994 vote to refrain from pursuing a national I-A playoff. In the article, it notes that smaller conferences were disadvantaged by a system that, aside from the WAC, had shut them out of the Alliance. And they were going to either lobby for a larger playoff or, like the WAC and now the MAC, form conference championship games to try to boost revenue.

The two new MAC members experienced divergent fortunes in their first seasons back in the league. Northern Illinois went winless in their first year in the conference, finishing 0-11 to land in the MAC West cellar. Marshall, on the other hand, lost just once in conference play and booked their ticket to Detroit to face Toledo in the conference championship game.

In the snow on Marshall’s home field in Huntington, the Thundering Herd kicked a field goal to go ahead in the first quarter. Toledo took a 7-3 lead into the locker room at halftime, but Marshall pulled away in the second half on a snowy day as Randy Moss set the single-season I-A record for receiving touchdowns as he caught three scoring passes in the second half.

1998-2004: Controversies mark shift into the new millennium

This was the landscape as it would exist heading into the 21st century. There were several conference shifts over this period, as the Big West died off and the Mountain West came into existence. But the number of conference championship games remained at four.

1998 marked the birth of the Bowl Championship Series, as the successor to the Bowl Coalition and the Bowl Alliance finally managed to pull the Big Ten and Pac-10 into the fold. With that, a new mechanism for crowning the national champion put even more pressure on teams that had to play in a conference championship game.

That became apparent right away in the BCS era, as No. 2 Kansas State went from a spot in the inaugural BCS championship game to being shut out of the BCS bowl games when they lost the 1998 Big 12 title game to Texas A&M. The No. 10 Aggies downed the Wildcats 36-33 in double overtime to steal away the conference crown and relegate Kansas State to the Alamo Bowl. Tennessee had no such misfortune in the SEC championship, as they took down Mississippi State 34-14.

In 1999, the WAC disintegrated as eight members left to form the Mountain West Conference. With fewer than 12 teams remaining, the WAC championship game went out of existence, never to return.

Controversy struck again in 2001, as Nebraska reached the BCS national championship despite failing to reach the Big 12 championship game as the North representative. The Cornhuskers fell to Colorado 62-36 in Boulder on the final weekend of the regular season, giving the Buffaloes the spot in the Big 12 title game.

Colorado beat Texas 39-37 for the conference title, but the Buffaloes were sidestepped by the BCS rankings in favor of the Nebraska team that they trounced head-to-head. The BCS also put Nebraska into the championship game ahead of Pac-10 champion Oregon, who finished alone atop their league table with only one loss in the round-robin schedule. Nebraska went on to get blown out by Miami for the national title, while Colorado and Oregon were relegated to the Fiesta Bowl.

In 2003, Kansas State toppled Oklahoma when the Sooners were on the cusp of a spot in the BCS championship. And in 2004, Auburn were shut out of the BCS championship despite getting a 13th victory in the SEC championship game over Tennessee, as the algorithm settled on a USC team that didn’t have to play a title game and an Oklahoma side that was forced to beat Colorado for the Big 12 crown.

2005: Two more conferences form title games with ACC, C-USA growth

In 2005, two more teams grew to the requisite dozen member schools required to launch a conference championship game. The ACC had grown to 11 teams a year earlier, when Miami and Virginia Tech left the Big East to realign with their new league.

Then, in 2005, Boston College made a concurrent shift that gave the ACC a 12th member and the opportunity to split into two divisions. As two years of contentious expansion came to a conclusion, the split between automatic-qualifying conferences in the BCS with conference title games and those without became level.

After bringing in the Hurricanes and Hokies in 2004, the ACC lobbied the NCAA to hold a conference championship game with 11 teams. The proposal was rejected, and the league was forced to wait until Boston College came on board to finally hold a game that was anticipated from the outset to mean millions more in revenue for the conference.

In a much more chaotic series of moves, Conference USA grew from 11 teams to 12 teams. Five members left the league between 2004 and 2005, with Cincinnati, Louisville, and South Florida joining the Big East to replace the three teams lost to the ACC. At the same time, Army and Temple went independent. In their place, Conference USA brought in Rice, Tulsa, SMU, and UTEP from the WAC and also added Marshall and UCF from the MAC.

As the game of musical chairs finally settled, the number of conference championships held at the FBS level increased to five. In the inaugural ACC championship game, Florida State and Virginia Tech played a rematch of the 2000 BCS national championship when the two teams were in separate conferences. The Seminoles won the ACC Atlantic with four losses on their record, while the Marcus Vick-led Hokies were 10-1 and ranked No. 5 in the BCS standings.

The first half featured a defensive struggle, as the Hokies and Seminoles traded first-quarter field goals and went to the locker room tied 3-3. In the third quarter, Florida State opened up a 27-3 lead with 24 unanswered points. Then Virginia Tech flipped the script in the fourth quarter, with a 19-point run of their own. In the waning minutes, the Hokies recovered an onside kick but possession went to the Seminoles after it was deemed that the kick only traveled nine yards. The Seminoles ran out the clock and earned the conference’s spot in the Orange Bowl.

On the same day that Florida State prevailed over Virginia Tech, the Conference USA title game pitted UCF against Tulsa. The pair of 8-4 teams squared off for the league crown at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, as the conference championship featured a pair of newcomers to the C-USA ranks. A high-scoring first half saw Tulsa take a 31-27 lead into halftime. After the intermission, the Golden Hurricane shut out their hosts to run away with a 44-27 victory.

After 2005, the musical chairs of college football sat dormant for the next six years. The delineation between haves and have-nots was stark, as certain leagues had benefitted at the expense of other conferences. The gulf between the automatic qualifiers and the non-AQ leagues was continuing to widen even after Utah became the first-ever BCS Buster in 2004.

As University of Texas president Larry R. Faulkner told the Chronicle of Higher Education in a May 2003 article, at a moment when the ACC/Big East realignment talk first started to heat up, “I think any school gets a certain amount of identity from its conference affiliation because a large fraction of the public’s news about an institution comes from sports reporting. That means there is an identity by association.”

Before the Bowl Coalition came online in 1992 and the SEC launched the first conference championship game in the same year, affiliation with a league was far less significant for a school. Independence was still a commonplace choice for a school, especially those on the east coast. But once high-profile independents like Florida State, Miami, and Penn State opted to join the ACC, Big East, and Big Ten respectively in the early 1990s, the writing was on the wall.

Affiliation was now no longer a benefit but a necessity for all but Notre Dame. Other schools would hang on as independent programs, but it increasingly placed an artificial ceiling on the head of football teams that opted to go that route.

2011: Big Ten and Pac-12 grow, form championships at Big 12’s expense

As the second decade of the 21st century rolled around, college football saw two more of its major conferences bulk up to 12 teams while depleting a rival further. That those two conferences were the longtime Rose Bowl partners that helped kill the Bowl Coalition and Bowl Alliance with their unwillingness to join was all the more painful for the league that suffered at their expense.

As Nebraska left for the Big Ten and Colorado bolted to join an expanding Pac-10 conference, the Big 12 found itself in danger of completely collapsing. There was legitimate talk for a brief period of the Pac-10 absorbing not just Colorado (and Utah from the Mountain West) but also Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State to form a supercharged Pac-16.

Oklahoma was “30 minutes away” from realigning, but ultimately the deal collapsed. The Longhorns’ insistence on retaining television broadcast rights to lower tiers of content for their own nascent Longhorn Network, rather than signing them away to the new Pac-12 Network, played a major role in scuttling the deal.

The Big 12 was able to continue on with 10 members, but it forced the conference to stop holding its annual championship game. A year later, Texas A&M and Missouri ditched the depleted Big 12 for membership in an expanding SEC. With the departure, the league turned to TCU from the Mountain West and West Virginia from the fading Big East to fortify the Big 12 ranks.

Looking westward, the Pac-12 failed to secure the bigger prize of the Longhorns and Sooners, but the addition of Colorado and Utah still allowed the league to split into two divisions and play their first conference title game. Opting for a pod system, the league divided into South and North divisions for the 2011 season.

In the South, USC led the way with a 10-2 record. But since the Trojans were in the midst of sanctions surrounding the recruitment of Reggie Bush, they were ineligible to play for the Pac-12 title and shut out of postseason play. In their place, 6-6 UCLA earned the chance to play 10-2 Oregon at Autzen Stadium.

UCLA put up a valiant fight, but Chip Kelly‘s Ducks pulled clear for a 49-31 victory in the inaugural Pac-12 championship game. The Ducks went on to win Oregon’s first Rose Bowl championship since 1917, as De’Anthony Thomas busted off touchdown runs of 91 and 64 yards and Lavasier Tuinei hauled in two scoring receptions from Ducks quarterback Darron Thomas in 45-38 victory over Big Ten champion Wisconsin.

The Badgers made it to Pasadena for the instant classic against the Ducks thanks to their win in the inaugural Big Ten title contest against Michigan State. Wisconsin prevailed in the Leaders Division, beating out Penn State for the trip to Indianapolis. The Spartans claimed the Legends Division ahead of Michigan and Nebraska.

Bret Bielema’s squad went ahead 21-7 in the first quarter, but Michigan State rebounded for a 29-21 lead at the half. Entering the fourth quarter, the Spartans were still up by eight as they held a 36-28 advantage. The Badgers flipped the script, though, as Montee Ball caught a receiving touchdown from Russell Wilson and then punched in his third rushing score of the game to pull ahead of Michigan State inside the final five minutes.

In other title games around the country, Houston lost its chance to earn a BCS appearance when Southern Miss upset the Cougars in the 2011 C-USA championship. LSU won the SEC championship, earning a rematch of a divisional rematch they had already won against Alabama. The Crimson Tide won the second chance against the Bayou Bengals, rendering the SEC title game an exercise in pointlessness.

A year later, the Big Ten experienced the same issues that the Pac-12 faced with their first title game. Like USC in 2011, Ohio State and Penn State were ineligible for the conference championship game in the Big Ten in 2012. That opened the door for a 7-5 Wisconsin team to head to Indianapolis for a second straight year. There they downed 10-2 Nebraska in an upset that opened the door for MAC champion Northern Illinois to play in a BCS bowl game.

2013: Mountain West absorbs fallen WAC, forms a new title game

With the death of the Western Athletic Conference after the 2012 season, the Mountain West poached a few more teams to help make up for recent losses. Between 2011 and 2012, Utah and TCU had left for the Pac-12 and Big 12 respectively and BYU departed to try their hand at football independence.

Over that same period, the WAC lost Boise State, Nevada, Hawaii, and Fresno State to the Mountain West. The 50-year-old conference died away completely after 2012, and the Mountain West absorbed San Jose State and Utah State to get to 12 members. As the BCS came to a close and the world of FBS football prepared for the launch of the College Football Playoff, the Mountain West set itself up strongly for the new landscape on the horizon.

Fifteen years after the WAC championship game featured for the final time, the Mountain West championship game came online for the first time with a duel between Fresno State and Utah State. Both programs had joined the MWC in the previous few years of expansion and realignment, overtaking the charter members of the league that remained.

Until a loss to San Jose State rendered the dream moot, Fresno State had been on course for a run at busting the BCS, vaulting all the way up to No. 14 in the BCS standings before falling on Black Friday against the Spartans. The Bulldogs lost their chance at a perfect season, but they still managed to win the inaugural Mountain West championship game with a 24-17 survival against 8-4 Utah State.

The rest of the conference title games played out to form, as No. 1 Florida State and No. 2 Auburn won the ACC and SEC respectively. That set up a clear-cut matchup for the final BCS national championship game, where Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston and the Seminoles ended the SEC’s eight-year run of national championships just before the College Football Playoff came into existence to supplant the BCS.

The other major conference championships saw Michigan State knock off then-No. 2 Ohio State 34-24 for the Big Ten crown and Stanford defeating Arizona State in Tempe for the Pac-12 championship. The Spartans and Cardinal met up in the Rose Bowl for the traditional showdown of the Big Ten and Pac-12 champions.

Once the College Football Playoff came online in 2014, one of the biggest questions was how the selection committee would treat conference championships. The first season, Ohio State earned the No. 4 spot en route to the national title thanks to their Big Ten conference championship upset of Wisconsin. Entering the game in Indianapolis as heavy underdogs, the Buckeyes instead pitched a 59-0 shutout against the Badgers for the blowout win and the conference crown.

Every other participant in the first College Football Playoff won a conference championship game, as Alabama, Florida State, and Oregon earned the other three spots in the semifinals. Baylor and TCU, the co-champions in the Big 12, were shut out of the first playoff as they lacked the additional decisiveness of the conference championship game.

2015: American forms championship game from Big East ashes

For the first time in Naval Academy history, the Midshipmen forfeited more than a century of independence in 2015 to join the American Athletic Conference. The league, formed out of the ashes of the Big East two years earlier, bulked up to 12 teams with the addition of Navy. In the process, they also added a conference championship game as they continued the quest to regain the top-flight status that was lost with the shift from the BCS to the College Football Playoff.

Houston knocked off Temple in the first AAC championship game, earning themselves the New Year’s Six berth designated for the top Group of Five champion. The Cougars would go on to win the Peach Bowl against Florida State, taking down the Seminoles 38-24 in Atlanta to finish the season 13-1.

What is interesting is that, at the same time the conference championship game was seemingly becoming a more significant and commonplace part of conference membership, the College Football Playoff seemed intent on de-emphasizing title games completely.

2015 marked the last time where the College Football Playoff consisted of four conference champions. Clemson defeated North Carolina to secure the No. 1 berth in the semifinals. Alabama defeated Florida to land the No. 2 position. Michigan State downed Iowa for the No. 3 spot opposite the Crimson Tide. In the fourth spot, though, an Oklahoma team that had no conference title game to play finished ahead of a Stanford team that beat USC in Santa Clara for the Pac-12 crown.

A year later, a new precedent was set as conference championships took a backseat to selecting the “best four teams” for the College Football Playoff. Both conference championships and head-to-head records were thrown out the window when it came time to determine the four teams in the playoff field, as the committee deemed Penn State’s record to be a disqualifier.

Ohio State went to Beaver Stadium on October 22 sporting the No. 2 ranking. The Buckeyes and Nittany Lions played a spirited contest that was ultimately won by Penn State 24-21. By the end of the regular season, that head-to-head result handed the division to the Nittany Lions. Penn State downed Wisconsin in the Big Ten championship game in Indianapolis, winning 38-31 against the No. 6 team in the country.

But the selection committee opted to pick Ohio State for the four-team playoff field. With their only loss coming against Penn State, the committee deemed the Buckeyes a stronger team than the two-loss conference champion that toppled Urban Meyer’s crew on the field.

The committee justified its choice of the Buckeyes by pointing to Penn State’s 42-39 loss at sub-.500 rival Pittsburgh. In the process, the conference championship game was relegated to a consolation prize for the Nittany Lions.

2017: Big 12 title game comes back online after rules changes

At the NCAA convention in January 2016, a rules change passed that ended the restrictions on hosting conference championship games. Before, a conference was required to have at least 12 teams broken up into two distinct divisions. With the rules changes, conferences with fewer than 12 teams could host title games. Leagues also had more latitude on determining how to select their top two teams to play in the championship game.

The Big 12 took advantage, rebooting their conference title contest in 2017. Oklahoma and TCU met for the league crown, with the Sooners prevailing for the second time over the Horned Frogs. With the win, Heisman winner Baker Mayfield and the rest of first-year head coach Lincoln Riley’s squad advanced for a Rose Bowl showdown with Georgia.

Feeling the same sting that Penn State endured the year before, a conference championship game victory couldn’t save Ohio State when they were pitted against an Alabama team that failed to win the SEC West. Like the Buckeyes when they were selected over the Nittany Lions in 2016, Urban Meyer’s crew was deemed to be subjectively less impressive as a team than the Crimson Tide.

What it demonstrated was that, while conference championship games were not quite the shibboleth they appeared to be, these games had less significance in the College Football Playoff era. For the top teams that contended for conference crowns each year, they were sometimes a boon for a team’s case and other times a burden that only served to muddle the water or prove insignificant for the committee.

Even as their impact within the selection process seemed to diminish, though, the popularity of these games continued to grow.

Present: Formation of Sun Belt title game gets every FBS league on board

That popularity led the Sun Belt to take advantage of the same revised policy around hosting a conference championship game that led the Big 12 to relaunch their own title contest. With the inaugural contest taking place in Boone between East champ Appalachian State and West winner Louisiana. The Mountaineers earned the right to host the game thanks to their superior record in both conference and overall play.

Though the Sun Belt featured only 10 teams, they opted to split the teams into East and West divisions and play a title game between the division winners. The decision to select a two-conference setup demonstrated the fluidity of the new policy, as the Sun Belt opted to determine its two title-game participants differently than the Big 12. By choosing to go the divisional route, the Sun Belt was left with a five-loss Ragin’ Cajuns team playing 10-2 Appalachian State in the inaugural championship.

Once the Sun Belt game comes online, it will render the takeover of the conference championship game complete. Within just over a 25-year span, title games went from a curio to an ever-present facet of the college football calendar.

It has been a long, strange trip for the conference championship game. In many ways, they are still more of a cash grab than a necessity; for instance, there is no logical reason why a Big 12 conference that plays a round-robin schedule needs an extra game to decide a championship when head-to-head results can separate any tiebreakers.

But the perception that these games are a necessity has been anchored in the consciousness not just of college football fans but also a generation of players that has never known anything but a time when the conference championship game was the preferred method for dispensing crowns for the bulk of FBS leagues.

The past quarter-century certainly proved that nothing is static in college football or in life. Not only do rules change, but perceptions also change. Games that were once treated like a blight on the sport are now perceived to be not just attractive but a prerequisite for legitimizing a team’s place in the college football hierarchy.

The College Football Playoff era has served to subtly delegitimize the outsized impact of these games. But given the fact that the FBS leagues have worked to rewrite the rules to liberalize the requirements for hosting a conference championship game, there is no reason to imagine conference championships going anywhere in the future.