"It's means something to win an SEC championship": Steve Sarkisian contemplates weekend games idea after new changes in 2025 CFB playoff

Steve Sarkisian will be heading into Year 5 of his head coaching stint at Texas with hopes of winning the CFP national championship in 2026. The last two years had been a big disappointment for the program, where they struggled to convert games in the final lap during the playoffs and got deprived of natty game tickets.

This season, things are expected to change with a new seeding model on table, and the hype around conference championship games. While speaking at the 2025 SEC spring meetings, Sarkisian was asked about the idea of weekend conference championship games.

The veteran coach mentioned that the concept of playoff has changed over the years. It was a lot different in the 2000s, when he was the QB coach at USC.

There was basically no playoffs unlike today, where 12 teams recommended by the selection committee get an equal chance to compete for the national title. He contemplated the idea of weekend games and claimed that SEC being a highly competitive league should consider its options rationally.

When asked about his views on a championship weekend, Sarkisian said (5:00):

“I value the championship game weekend. ... It means something to win an SEC championship. And anybody that tells you it's diminished, they're lying. It means a lot. It means a lot in our building, and I'm sure in everybody else's building, to those players, you know.

"And so I think one of the challenges of that is, you know, in a lot of other sports, they have a regular-season champion, and then they have a tournament, a conference tournament champion. We don't have that in football."

He added:

“I also looked at it from our fans' perspective. That was a lot of our fans, you know, to say we're going to go to Atlanta and play a conference championship game. Then we had to play the first round of the playoffs, and then we had to go back to Atlanta for the Peach Bowl. Then we had to go to Dallas.

"And so you're putting a lot of fans to start to travel differently than in some of the other sports tournaments where they have, like this weekend in baseball, we got four teams coming to Austin that are all competing to get to a Super Regional and things of that nature. So I just think we've got to do a great job, from a college football perspective, to really look at it from every angle."

Steve Sarkisian and Co. could benefit from the new CFP seeding model

This season, the college football playoff will have a seeding format where the top four seeds won't be decided on the basis of conference championship games but by the selection committee. Last season, the champions of top four conferences got placed as top seeds and were entitled for the first-round bye.

But this season, the top four seeds of the selection committee will be the ones who get to make their way directly into the second-round. Programs like Texas will benefit the most even if it fails to finish atop the SEC leaderboard. This will also help it prepare better for the national championship game with less proximity to injuries during the playoff matchups.