MORGANTOWN — There has been a lot of action in the past couple of days in college football regarding the future formats for the College Football Playoff.
The athletic directors and conference have been meeting to change and review last year’s controversial system that saw the four highest-ranked conference champions receive the top four seeds. This created lopsided matchups because two of the four highest-ranked conference champions weren’t better than their competitors.
Last week, this system received a hot fix. The conferences agreed that just the highest-ranked teams would receive the top four seeds, with the five conference champions still getting automatic bids.
This wasn’t enough for SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, though. At the start of this week were the SEC meetings with coaches and athletic directors. Sankey and SEC coaches reportedly favor a five-plus-11 model, making the 12-team playoff 16 teams. Five teams would receive automatic qualifiers from either winning a conference championship or being ranked highly.
This change comes to allow more SEC teams into the tournament and allows a nine-game SEC schedule.
Sankey and the rest of the SEC don’t believe the other conferences play as difficult a schedule, which hurts their postseason chances, because they believe the committee favors fewer losses than quality wins.
The SEC commissioner then took a shot at the Big 12 and ACC, two of the conferences on the outside looking in. Sankey said the other conferences released press releases questioning his “love of the game,” per ESPN’s Pete Thamel, but it simply wasn’t true. The Big 12 didn’t release anything and the conference commented on how it was false.
Sankey and the SEC are starting to drive a wedge between themselves and the other conferences without taking direct shots. They feel they are superior and there are rumors the SEC could leave the NCAA. There’s another that college football could adopt a bid system where the SEC and Big Ten get four each and the Big 12 and ACC get two each.
The issue is that the Big 12, ACC and the other conferences can’t fire back for a couple of reasons.
The first is because they don’t have the resumes to combat the strength of the Big Ten and SEC. The SEC and Big Ten have historically done better than the Big 12 and ACC. In the 10-year history of the College Football Playoff, the ACC has won twice, and the rest have been either Big Ten or SEC teams. The closest Big 12 team was TCU in 2022, but it wasn’t particularly close, because the Horned Frogs lost 65-7.
The Big 12 and ACC saw the Big Ten and SEC’s success over the years, too, so they gave the two conferences all the power to make decisions on the future formats.
So, most decisions will favor the SEC and Big Ten. There’s not much the Big 12 and ACC can do. The only thing that’ll shift college football in their favor is to be more competitive. There were only three teams from the Big 12 and ACC, and all three lost by at least a touchdown in their first games. They haven’t been.
Right now, Sankey, the SEC and the Big Ten steer the ship of the future of college football until there’s a committee, like Donald Trump’s proposed College Sports Commission, that governs and controls the NCAA. It might help, too, if West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez joins the staff as a representative of the Big 12.
Then, the other conferences not named the SEC and Big Ten might get some love, but the only way to change it now is to play better.
