The Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) has established a Championship game that will pit the top teams between two pods – dubbed the 'Sun' and 'Surf' divisions – to determine the conference's official champion and recipient of the automatic qualifying berth to the NCAA Championships.

The league's six teams will be grouped into two pods of three, organized on a two-year cycle. Teams will play opponents in their pod twice and teams in the other pod once for a total of seven games that count toward the conference standings. Games will take place from Weeks 4-10, with the teams holding the best record in each pod playing for the championship at the site of the team with the best record (the head-to-head winner will host in the case of a tie). The second-and third-place teams in each pod will also face each other in third- and fifth-place games that will alternate home sites by pod each year. The Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference is the only other conference in Division III that currently plays a championship game; the Midwest Conference and former NEFC previously also played divisional schedules with a title game, according to D3football.com.

The NCAA's only football conference based solely in California, the SCIAC consists of six programs in the greater Los Angeles area – California Lutheran University, Chapman University, Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Colleges, the University of La Verne, Pomona-Pitzer Colleges and the University of Redlands. Three other core members do not currently sponsor football – Caltech, Occidental College and Whittier College. Founded in 1915, the SCIAC has consisted of nine total members since 2011 after 20 years as an eight-member conference. Members have won 11 national titles in the last six years.

California Lutheran, Chapman and CMS will compete in one pod while La Verne, Pomona-Pitzer and Redlands compete in the other for the 2023 and 2024 seasons. Conference play will begin on September 23, 2023 this fall.