Conferences will be able to determine the teams that will participate in their respective title game under the new rules announced by the NCAA Division I Council. The decision paves the way for conferences to eliminate divisions altogether and avoid having title-game matchups determined by division winners.
The Power 5 conference changed things up very quickly. After the NCAA announcement, the Pac-12 decided to feature the teams with the two highest winning percentages in the title game.
The goal is to place our two best teams in the championship game, which we believe will provide our conference with the best chance to win a national championship.
In the past 11 years, divisions have kept the conference title game from featuring two teams with better rankings, according to the release. The conference title games would have featured two teams ranked in the top 10 in the previous two years, if it weren't for divisions, which allowed an unranked UCLA team and then a 9-5 UCLA team to play in the title game instead of an 11-1 UCLA team.
The conference brought the motion of deregulating title games to the council. The motion was unanimously supported by all the conferences.
It has been a long time since this news was announced. The conference believes that every league should have the right to decide how to run its championship game, and that's why they started pushing for deregulation.
The legislation was never passed. The league would revisit this topic once again, according to JimPhillips, who took over the league in 2021. Deregulation has made its way across the college football landscape. The next logical step would be to eliminate the divisional format.
The conference believes scrapping the divisional format will allow for more compelling games, more opportunities for teams to play each other, and the chance to get multiple teams into the College Football Playoff. The conference with the most appearances has been the Atlantic Coast Conference, with seven, followed by the Pacific-12 with two.
Conferences will be affected by the scrapping of divisions. Even though the current conference football schedule is based on two divisions, the conference will continue to review scheduling scenarios for future seasons.
The league discussed getting rid of divisions and moving to a 3-6-5 scheduling format, with three permanent rivals for each team, at the end of the spring meetings in Amelia Island, Florida.
All indications are that the divisional format will go into effect for the 2023 season after the conference did not vote on it.
The opportunity for our student-athletes to play every school in the Atlantic Coast Conference over a four-year period is one of the drivers. They want to dictate what their championship structure looks like, and which will lead into an expanded football playoff.
You want your two best teams to have a chance to play at the end of the year for a lot of reasons.
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