Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz asked the question this week that nobody running college football wants to answer: if the 24-team College Football Playoff eliminates conference championship games, why do conferences even exist anymore?

The answer ordinary fans already sense is that conferences have become nothing more than scheduling vehicles — and expensive ones at that. The same corporate-media-money machine that turned bowl games into afterthoughts and the transfer portal into free agency has now swallowed the one thing that still gave conference affiliation a pulse.

"Why are we associated with conferences anymore if we're not playing for a conference championship?" Drinkwitz told reporters Tuesday. "If the point now is just to be playing into a sea of 24, are we just doing it for scheduling affiliation? If we're just doing it for scheduling affiliation, is there a reason to be flying all the way across the country to play games from a national perspective?"

He's not alone. Wake Forest head coach Jake Dickert echoed the same concern, according to Breitbart. "To not say we're going to have conference champions, why do we have conferences?" Dickert said. "I don't like it, personally. Right now, you're like, 'Man, all of the championship games are going away.'"

They are. The 24-team CFP expansion wiped them out. Now the process for determining a league's champion reverts to the old voting system that existed before championship games were ever played — which is to say, it's not determined on the field at all. Meanwhile, Notre Dame, a program that refuses to join a conference, remains eligible for a bye and home field if it finishes in the top four. So much for the rewards of affiliation.

Fox News framed the crisis as a downstream consequence of NIL and the transfer portal — the moment players started getting paid, the NCAA had no rules and the conferences had no plan. That's part of it. But Drinkwitz named the deeper rot: the devaluation of everything that made the sport matter to the people who watch it. "Bowl games are no longer valuable," Drinkwitz said. "Building a program and having a season to build for the next season, where your fans could be excited about these guys playing — there's none of that because you don't know who's going to be back. Every team's starting over each year."

Breitbart noted the travel cost angle that should alarm every athletic director staring down budget shortfalls. The ACC, Big Ten, and Big 12 now stretch across both coasts. Why spend millions flying teams across the country for scheduling affiliation when you could build ten competitive matchups locally and save a fortune?

The people who built this system will call it progress. They called NIL progress. They called realignment progress. They called a 12-team playoff progress, and now they've nearly doubled it to 24. Each time, something people loved got hollowed out and replaced with a product. The question Drinkwitz raised isn't really about conferences. It's about whether anything in college football still belongs to the people who care about it — or whether it all belongs to the people who profit from it.