Precious few days remain in the college football offseason, offering final moments for quiet introspection before the media blitz hits.
The blitz of college football “media days” begins with the Big 12 on July 8-9 in Frisco, Texas, and continues with four days of SEC talk in Atlanta July 14-17 before the ACC and Big Ten coaches take the stage July 22-24 in Charlotte, N.C., and Las Vegas, respectively.
The College Football Playoff model figures to be among the most widely discussed among coaches at the events, which each league making its pitch.
Three changes will go into effect in the CFP next season, in what’s expected to be the final year of the 12-team field before an anticipated expansion to 16 teams:
• There will be straight seeding (based on final rankings by the CFP selection committee)
• Conference champions will not be guaranteed first-round byes
• The four highest-seeded teams will receive first-round byes
The words of SEC commissioner Greg Sankey have resonated over the past month, with college executives, commissioners and fans alive deliberating on exactly how an expanded format — the playoffs are expected to go from 12 to 16 teams starting with the 2026 season — should look like.
Sankey’s plea is for politics to be excluded from the discussion on the best method to select and seed the teams.
“Consensus building is one thing, continual compromise and diminishes is another,” Sankey said on the SEC Network last month.
“These allocations for other conferences …. we were introducing a political solution because we needed unanimity (to get to a 12-team playoff in 2024 and 2025).”
Sankey, and the SEC coaches, have taken the position that the priority should be to have the best college football teams in the CFP field.
“I’ve always said, let’s go one through eight, one through 12, I’ve said in the current context, let’s go one through 16,” Sankey said.
“(But) we have this political compromise around five conference champions — I don’t need that compromise, the SEC doesn’t need that compromise — we’ve earned everything that we’ve obtained in the college football playoff through the agreed upon process, others have displaced.”
Sankey shared some insight into the feedback he’s getting from SEC coaches.
“It is harder for me to explain in my room, in this era, after all the movement of teams (in conference realignment), why those types of allocations exist,” Sankey said.
Georgia coach Kirby Smart has been one of the voices in college football to speak up.
One of the points Smart made at the SEC spring meetings was that other sports don’t seem to have the same political interference when determining champions.
“You look at the women’s softball world series, you look at men’s baseball, you look at men’s basketball, 13 of 16, 14 of 16, and they’re larger pools,” Smart said. “But when you look at what they’re able to do, and there’s no outcry, and there’s nobody beating the drum saying that it’s completely unfair.
“They do a lot of things based on RPI, they do a lot of things based on strength of schedule, and there are reward teams for that.”
Indeed, and Sankey has gone to great lengths to provide evidence that SEC football is worthy of the same sort of treatment when determining the College Football Playoff field.
“When you look at the metrics our conference is unique competitively,” Sankey said. “We don’t have many teams outside the top 50 frequently, everyone else does, has a much different spread.
“That’s different, and that has to be understood.”
Sankey knows better than anyone there’s work to be done to get the SEC and Big Ten — which have controlling interest in the CFP format — on the same page.
The Big Ten is advocating for all leagues to play a nine-game conference schedule — as it does.
But to Sankey’s point, the depth of quality teams in the SEC puts the league at a disadvantage; more quality teams mean a greater likelihood for more quality wins, but also, quality losses.
Last year’s CFP committee placed a greater emphasis on the number of losses than the number of quality wins.
The automatic allocation of teams from other conferences — regardless of their rank — displaced SEC teams that were worthy of College Football Playoff spots, as well as better seeds.
It led Sankey to a conclusion that the SEC, in the interest of ensuring the best teams make the playoff field, doesn’t have any more room to give.
“How many more compromises are there to make this work,” Sankey said. “And maybe those compromises need to come from some other corner, rather than the Southeastern Conference.”
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