Sorry, I really disagree with this premise.
Ohio St. had the best conference record in the Big 10. They win the conference. No champioship game needed.
USC tied for the best conference record in the Pac 10. They beat ASU head-to head. They win the conference. No championship game needed.
Conference championship games exist mainly to be revenue sources. Determining the conference's best team is incididental, if it occurs at all.
To begin with, a conference's 2 best teams don't necessarily play in the title game if they are from the same artificially created division (please see Oklahoma/Texas in most Big XII seasons). Sometimes a conference's 2nd best team is locked out when it loses a tiebreaker to another team from their division (please see Georgia this year in the SEC).
Undefeated Nebraska pooched a Big XII championship game against a 5 loss Texas team. Despite this, they still played in the National Title Game. What did the Big XII championship game mean that year? Absolutely nothing. Did this weekend's SEC championship conference game settle anything? Nope.
LSU struggled to beat a mediocre Tennessee team. Yawn.
What if UT had won? Would that have made the SEC a stronger or weaker conference? Wouldn't UT have then been more deserving than Georgia for the BCS title game? (Beat them head-to-head, won division, won conference)
I blame the SEC and Arkansas for this entire BCS mess. If the SEC hadn't been greedy and pulled Arkansas away from the Southwest conference:
1) The SEC wouldn't have expanded into a 12 team, 2 division conference.
2) The SEC wouldn't have needed a bogus conference championship game.
3) The Big XII would still be the Big 8.
4) The Southwest Conference would still exist.
5) The Big Least would not exist for football.
6) None of the other conferences would have followed the SEC's lead of stealing teams, realigning into divisions and creating conference championship games.
7) The stooopid overtime rule would never have been needed and football games could still end in ties (as God intended).
8) The Cotton Bowl would still be a big deal.
9) The Fiesta bowl would still be just a Phoenix businessman's greedy dream.
10) Conferences would still be sending their champs to their traditionally affiliated bowl games.
11) East Coast sportwriters and weenie computer geeks - neither group ever actually played football - wouldn't have such a profound influence on a weekly basis into our sports conversations.
How is the current system any better than the old "mythical championship?" A college football national champion is still just a myth - no matter how many confernce championship games, computer weenies, or ESPN talking heads you throw at it.
“How is the current system any better than the old “mythical championship?” A college football national champion is still just a myth - no matter how many confernce championship games, computer weenies, or ESPN talking heads you throw at it.”
Absolutely correct.
I'm not sure about that one. It certainly wouldn't have existed as a first tier conference. (SMU post death penalty, Rice, Baylor, Houston) TCU had a few good years post breakup. Compare it to an SEC made up of Kentucky, Vandy, Tulane, University of the South (f/k/a Sewanee), Ga Tech, Alabama, Auburn and LSU.
Indeed, Arkansas probably wouldn't have left but for the SMU fiasco. So if you want to blame anyone, blame SMoo.
For one thing . . . the Cotton Bowl ceased to be a major bowl once the Southwest Conference (whose champion received an automatic bid to the game) disbanded in 1996 and its top teams joined with the old Big 8 to form the Big 12 Conference. Those old days of SMU, Texas, Texas A&M, and Oklahoma never would have come back, regardless of what happened with Arkansas and the SEC.
The old "automatic bid" system penalized Big Ten and Pac-10 teams by forcing the conference champions to play against each other -- no matter how good or bad these teams were (I believe a 7-4 team that wasn't even ranked in the Top 25 could conceivably win an automatic Rose Bowl bid). Independent schools had a big advantage in seeking national titles because they could accept bids from any bowl game in which the #1 or #2 team was playing. This is why independents like Penn State, Miami and Notre Dame won a disproportionate number of the national titles in the 1980s and early 1990s under the "old" system.
My complaint about conference championships (or lack thereof) is not that they are necessary, but that comparing teams from conferences with these games to teams that don't have them is inherently unfair. In some of these cases (you brought up a good example with Nebraska) they serve only to force a good team with the opportunity to play (and possibly lose) one additional game -- and usually against a very strong opponent, too.
Conference championship games make more sense today than they did 15-20 years ago mainly because more and more conferences are now large enough that each team cannot play every other team in the conference during the course of a regular season. Heck -- the Big Ten has even refused to change its name even though it has had 11 teams for more than a decade!