The goals of every BCS conference team at the start of the season are two-fold.  First, win your conference and second, make it to the national championship game.  Once the season begins, a side goal is to lose early if you do lose, so as to setup a better ranking at the end of the season.  Three of the six BCS conferences have a championship game and three do not, so the question is whether conference championship games are good or bad for the parties involved.  

Conference championship games are in fact a dangerous thing, especially when one division winner is strong and the other is 8-3 or 7-4. The underdog always seems to have the advantage (just look at what happens in the Big 12 and SEC now & then) in that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Not a good place to be for a top 5 team to be when your opponent is hungry!  

Past history in the Big 12 shows the following:  

1996 – Texas (7-4) defeated #3 Nebraska (10-1) 37-27  

1998 – #10 Texas A&M (10-2) defeated #2 Kansas State (11-0) 36-33 in 2OT  

2001 – #9 Colorado (9-2) defeated #3 Texas (10-1) 39-37  

2003 – #15 Kansas State (10-3) defeated #1 Oklahoma (13-0) 35-7  

So, four out of eleven years, the underdog has pulled an upset four times.  In the SEC, the underdog pulled off the upset four times in fifteen years.  

1994 – #6 Florida (9-1-1) defeated #3 Alabama (11-0) 24-23  

1999 – #7 Alabama (9-2) defeated #5 Florida (9-2) 34-7  

2001 – #21 LSU (8-3) defeated #2 Tennessee (10-1) 31-20 

2005 – #13 Georgia (9-2) defeated #3 LSU (10-1) 34-14  

And finally, in the ACC, we have  

2005 - #22 Florida State (7-4) defeated #5 Virginia Tech (10-1) 27-22  

The underdog winning one out of the two years the championship game was played.  

NOTE:  Records shown were the team’s record at the time of the championship game.  

So what does this tell us?  They tell us that there is no reward without risk in these particular conferences, as the “extra” game leaves open the possibility for a major impact to a team’s bowl placement.  Win and you're in.  Lose and you're most likely out. 

And playing a team you’ve already beaten once that season doesn’t increase your odds of winning a second time, though the team you've beaten will be up for the game to settle the score! 

Me, I'd rather play in a conference like the PAC 10 where every team plays each other, round-robin fashion, where the one with the best in-conference record crowned the champion.  Since teams in twelve-team conferences don't play all the other teams in conference, there really isn't a good way to judge which team is the best.  Just look at Kansas this year.  Had they played Oklahoma or Texas, they might have been exposed early on as a pretender instead of a contender!

The truth of the matter is that it is better to come in second in your division with an early loss to your division's winner. By the end of the season, say your record is 10-1 or 11-1. That alone should have you ranked in the top 15 let alone even in the top 5.

Look at the Big 12 this year which prior to last week had 3 teams in the top 5. It's really too bad that Missouri and Kansas had to play each other in the last game of the season. Looking at it hypothetically, had those two teams played at the start of conference play, and say Missouri had won, they would have identical one-loss records going into the Big 12 championship game. Missouri, having won the head to head match-up, would play OU in the championship game, while Kansas stayed home. But, either OU or Mizzou would lose, so surely Kansas would move up in the rankings without having played a game and would be a preferable selection for a BCS game not having suffered a loss in the championship game. 

The same scenario would work when the other division winner is 7-4. If that 7-4 team won the championship game, they get the automatic BCS bowl birth for the conference. However, the one-loss second place team in the division would most likely be ranked higher than the 10-1 or 9-2 division winner who lost the conference championship game.  This year, Kansas in the Big 12 and Georgia in the SEC have the best shot at being the second team from their respective conferences to make a BCS game.  Georgia may even be lucky enough to move up high enough to play in the national championship game if enough teams ahead of it lose this weekend.   

Surprisingly, Oklahoma is the one exception to a conference championship game loser not making it to the BCS.  Having lost the Big 12 championship game in 2003 to Kansas Sate, OU only fell to #2 in the final BCS rankings and still managed to play in the title game.  Bottom line, it pays to be a traditional national power!

For those teams that finish second in the conference and don’t get to play in the conference championship, a BCS berth is most likely, and a national championship berth is a possibility, depending on where the team ends up in the final BCS standings. Of course, the best way to make it to the national championship is to be a BCS conference member that wins out while playing a strong-schedule.