According to a report from Action Network’s Brett McMurphy, we already know what game the Big 12 Champion will play in when the new 12-team College Football Playoff finally gets here in December.
Since 2014, the Big 12 Champion has been guaranteed an automatic berth in the Sugar Bowl, unless it was part of the College Football Playoff semifinal rotation or the Big 12 Champion was selected to be a part of the CFP.
A decade later, however, the rules are changing again with the 2024 College Football Bowl Season. As McMurphy explained in a tweet on Wednesday, existing bowl agreements will determine where each conference champion will be headed in the second round of the College Football Playoff.
The SEC Champion will play in the Sugar Bowl — continuing the league’s long-standing relationship with the bowl — while the Big Ten Champ will continue going to the Rose Bowl.
Meanwhile, the Big 12 Champion will now be headed to the Fiesta Bowl and the ACC Champion will go to the Peach Bowl, for “proximity reasons.”
Of course, these rules are not absolute, as the new College Football Playoff rules do require some stipulations.
Should a Group of Five Champion be ranked higher than the Big 12 at the end of the year, the G5 Champion would likely head to the Fiesta Bowl, regardless of what might make sense from a proximity standpoint, as McMurphy explains here.
New formats means new rules, and with the bowl season schedule locked through the 2025 season, this is what Big 12 fans can expect for the next couple of years. So, get familiar with the Fiesta Bowl, folks. That’s the goal for Big 12 programs in the next couple of seasons.
