Pac-12 scraps divisions after NCAA Division I Council votes to eliminate requirements for FBS conference title games

The NCAA Division I Council announced Wednesday that it will relax restrictions on college football's conference championship games, allowing conferences to determine the teams that would participate in their respective title game. The decision paves the way for conferences to avoid having title game matchups determined by division winners as well as possibly eliminating divisions altogether.

It didn't take long for a Power 5 conference to change things up. Minutes after the NCAA announcement, the Pac-12 announced that starting in 2022, the conference's title game would feature the two teams with the highest winning percentage.

«Our goal is to place our two best teams in our Pac-12 Football Championship Game, which we believe will provide our conference with the best opportunity to optimize CFP invitations and ultimately win national championships,» said Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff in a press release. «Today's decision is an important step towards that goal and immediately increases both fan interest in, and the media value of, our Football Championship Game.»

In their press release, the Pac-12 outlined how, in five out of the last 11 years, divisions have kept the conference's title game from featuring a different matchup that includes two teams with better rankings. In both 2011 and 2012, for example, the conference title games would have featured Stanford and Oregon — both ranked in the top-10 during those two years — had it not been for divisions, which allowed an unranked UCLA team and a 9-5 UCLA team the following year to play in the title game instead of a 11-1 Stanford team and a 11-1 Oregon team.

As the Pac-12 made sure to note in their announcement, they were the conference that originally brought this