I Found the Best Way to Make Small Historic Conferences Work Without Conference Championship Games.
EA made the baffling decision when rolling out custom conferences to allow you to remove conference championship games, but ONLY for conferences of 12 teams or more. In order to get that old school feeling of small conferences pre-conference championship games, it makes sense to put two smaller conferences in the same conference, make two different divisions, and turn off the conference championship game. To use divisions and still get an acceptable conference scheduling that accounts for major rivalries like Red River and so forth, this lowers the cap from 20 teams in a conference to 16.
In a conference, you play 8 or 9 conference games, with no other choices in CFB26 or 27. If you have 12 teams in a conference and play 8 games, you would play 5 (division members minus yourself) games in a round robin against the rest of the division and 3 rotating games against the other side. If you have 14 teams in a conference and play 9 games, you would play 6 games in a round robin against the rest of your division, and 3 rotating games from the other side. This gets a bit more complicated when you add a protected cross division rival, because then the number of rotating games from the other side goes down by one.
In a 16 team conference, if you were to play 8 conference games with a protected rival, then you would play 7 games in a round robin against the rest of your division, and you would play the protected rival, and have no rotating games against the other division. This matters because it effectively means there are 7 teams you can never play in the regular season. This is fixed If you have 16 teams in a conference, and you play 9 conference games, because then you rotate through the rest of the league (albeit slowly). I hope you see where I’m going with this. In a 18-team conference, even with 9 games, you would play 8 games in a round robin against your division and one game against the other side. If you don’t have a protected rival, that’s fine since you rotate through everyone. But if you do (and likely should) have a protected rival, then the schedule has no rotating games.
As such, this alignment can’t be a 1-to-1 replica. The answer for this is to take what people have usually done with the Big Eight and Southwest and do that for other conferences that have a lot of overlap, like the ACC and Big East or Big Ten and PAC-8. The biggest issue is that these conferences did not fit into 8 team molds (Big Ten and PAC-8 equaling 18, ACC and Big East equaling 17, Big Eight and SWC equaling 17), so some teams need to get cut. I looked to history and which conference was the “host conference” and who was the guest conference to determine which teams would get cut. I decided I would not cut any of the “host” conference’s membership.
In the ACC-Big East merger, the ACC had 9 teams, the OG Big East had 8, so the Big East had to drop a team. They kicked out Temple historically, so Temple goes.
In the Big Eight-SWC merger, the Big Eight gave the name to the league, and is the host conference. The SWC had 9 teams; so it needed to drop one team. Houston was the last to join the SWC, joining in 1972, some 40-50 years after the majority of the conference had been together. When the SWC collapsed, Houston opted for C-USA instead of the WAC with Rice, TCU, and SMU. Houston goes.
In the Big Ten-PAC-8 merger, the Big Ten is the host league, so the PAC-8 had to drop two teams to get to 16 (no team could be moved to a 9 team division that didn’t have a required annual rival that would allow for 18 teams). In the 1950s, there was a major scandal in the PAC-8 that caused California, Stanford, UCLA, USC and Washington to abandon the league and try to form a national league with Notre Dame and the Service Academies; they planned on leaving Idaho, Oregon, Oregon State, and Washington State behind. That fell through, and they rebuilt the league again several years later, this time without Idaho. In 2023, California, Oregon, Stanford, UCLA, USC, and Washington all announced they were leaving for new conference homes on the other side of the country, leaving Oregon State and Washington State behind. Oregon State and Washington State stay behind.
The PAC-12 is loosely based on the old pre-1978 Arizona WAC with two additions of post-1978 Air Force, San Diego State and UNLV. I dropped UTEP from this lineup. Oregon State and Washington State would have been likely candidates to join if the Big Ten-PAC-8 merger would have happened.
Similarly, the MWC here is based on several iterations of the post-1998 WAC, with every team in this edition being a member of the WAC at one point.
I also moved the major independents of the 20th century into either the American or their modern homes (ACC for FSU, Big East for Miami, South Carolina to the SEC, etc etc). I did this because, outside of Notre Dame, the independent teams didn’t really play each other much so their schedules just filled up with G5 teams.
The American is host to what was early 1996 Conference-USA, sans Southern Miss and Tulane, in exchange for UAB, UCF, and USF. The other conference in the American is the major northeastern independents. Like the other merger leagues, they do not play for a conference championship.
There wasn’t a good league to merge with the SEC, so to get it to the required minimum of 12 teams, I added Tulane. I kept the divisions because most SEC teams have at least 3 rivals that should be played every year.
I also added the 2025 and 2026 playoffs to show how this turned out.
What do you think? Would you give this a try? I’m all ears for suggestions.