Divisional races drive interest in the sport for games that would otherwise matter less and far fewer people would watch.
This I agree with. Some guy brought this point up in previous threads. Eg, last year in the last week of the regular season, Minn vs Wisc mattered. It was on FOX.
If it was just #1 vs #2, then it was all but guaranteed that it would be a Ohio St vs Mich rematch, and probably none of the other games would matter.
So that is a nice thing.
College football on television would have grown without divisional races and CCGs, but not nearly as much as it has. It’s why every conference eventually followed the SEC into the divisional/ CCG model. It was television gold for the whole season. Before that the sport was only about rivalries and bowl games.
They wanted the CCG (for the TV $$$), and NCAA rules
required they split into divisions with the two division winners meeting in the CCG, in order for that extra game to be exempted from maximum limits on number of games in the regular season.
The SEC came up with the format in 1991, out of practicality, and the rules were simply never updated for a long time.
If there were no rules about that, confs would largely not have split into divisions when they expanded up to 12. The Big Ten never had divisions at 11 when Penn St was added. No reason to think adding one more to 12 they would ... except they were
required to by rule in order to have the CCG.
Rules only got updated when the Big XII lost Colorado, Texas A&M, Nebraska, and Missouri (and added TCU and West Virginia to get back to 10), with an exemption only allowed for conferences who play a full round-robin schedule. In other words, it was a specific carve-out for the Big XII, which had 10 teams and played a full round-robin with 9 conf games.
When the Big Ten CCG becomes a rematch, 7 days later, of Ohio State/ Michigan every other year, people will eventually be less interested not only in that game, but the whole process of determine who plays in it.
Which to me is why it is beyond obvious that they need to move that game to earlier in the season.