You’ve probably been busy the past three months going to work, paying bills, living your life. You probably haven’t been following every incremental development in the ongoing negotiations over the future format of the College Football Playoff beginning in 2026. So, allow me to catch you up.
In February, the leaders of the Big Ten and SEC held a joint meeting in New Orleans where they earnestly discussed what could be described as a coup. They would flex their muscle to expand the CFP to 14 teams and guarantee themselves four berths each, regardless of where their teams are ranked. The ACC and Big 12 would each get two, the Group of 5 conferences one.
Word got out, and the news was met with intense backlash from a public accustomed to postseason tournaments being based on the results of the season in question. Folks across the sport figured they’d eventually back down.
Well, three months later, that has not happened. The format currently being discussed is somehow more nonsensical than that one. As The Athletic’s Ralph Russo reported Wednesday, the commissioners have now skipped past 14 teams to 16, still with those slanted automatic berths. And not even a clean, simple bracket where No. 1 plays No. 16, No. 2 plays No. 15, etc.
“More likely, the CFP would look to start a week earlier, on what has traditionally been Army-Navy weekend,” writes Russo, “with the four lowest seeds (13 through 16) playing their way into the second weekend’s six-game bracket.”
Only in college football, where conference commissioners who serve at the behest of their league’s members also get to craft the postseason for the entire sport, could people muck up a perfectly good product this badly. It took a full season for the public to figure out how the first 12-team CFP worked. The format will change again in Year 2 with this week’s (smart) move to a straight seeding model this fall rather than reserving the top four seeds for conference champions. And now they’re talking about changing it even more drastically, a year after that.
No one asked for a First Four of college football. Will the games be played in Dayton? Those matchups last season (under the straight seeding model adopted Thursday) would have been No. 13 seed Miami (10-2) vs. No. 16 seed Clemson (10-3) and No. 14 seed Ole Miss (9-3) vs. No. 15 seed South Carolina (9-3). Games like this used to be known as the Outback Bowl.
And to shoehorn two play-in games into an ostensibly symmetrical 16-team field, the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds would get a double-bye into the quarterfinals. Imagine if the Detroit Lions and Kansas City Chiefs didn’t play their first postseason game until the third weekend of the NFL playoffs. This would be that, but their hiatus would be even longer because the gap between Army-Navy and New Year’s can be as long as three weeks.
And then there’s those guaranteed berths — the so-called 4-4-2-2-1 model, automatically giving the Big Ten and SEC the most bids. No major U.S. sport holds a postseason where certain divisions or conferences are guaranteed more berths than the others. The hubris of the Big Ten and SEC to even propose this, much less go forward with it, is astonishing even by Big Ten and SEC standards.
Those conferences will justify their rationale by citing historical data that says their current members would have averaged even more than four bids annually. They’re not wrong about that. Which is why putting it in writing is unnecessary.
And yet, they have not backed down from this nonsense. There’s a reason for that.
Nearly everyone The Athletic has spoken to about this subject over the past few months says this entire cockamamie scheme is the brainchild of Tony Pettiti, the third-year Big Ten commissioner who used to be a television executive. He needs those four automatic berths for the Big Ten so he can fulfill his dream of creating his league’s NBA Play-In Tournament on conference championship weekend — No. 3 versus No. 6, No. 4 versus No. 5, with the winners going to the CFP. His No. 6 seed last year would have been Iowa (8-4).
But he must have reason to believe Fox, CBS, NBC or perhaps one of umpteen streaming services will pay good money for the rights to these showdowns. As with every other decision in college athletics, it’s always about the money.
And schools are particularly thirsty for money these days because they might soon have to share some of it with their athletes. They are turning over every couch cushion and shining a flashlight looking for any loose change, lest they have to stop giving their coaches unsolicited raises and contract extensions.
That’s the case among SEC members, too. While commissioner Greg Sankey has not been the one driving the 4-4-2-2-1 push, he has not stepped in to stop it. It’s no secret he and his members are not the world’s biggest fans of the selection committee, and one of the selling points of automatic berths is that conference standings, not ADs and retired coaches, would determine the teams.
Which sounds good in theory, but then, why play nonconference games? Wouldn’t this year’s Texas-Ohio State Week 1 mega-showdown become essentially a preseason game? If you’re Steve Sarkisian, how many series before you sit Arch Manning and get a look at your backups?
Perhaps Petitti, Sankey and their members haven’t stopped to consider these sorts of ramifications. More likely they have, but an extra couple of million dollars per school has a way of making everything else seem irrelevant.
I can’t emphasize enough how much damage a predetermined, nonsensical bracket will cause for not just the CFP’s credibility, but college football’s popularity. It will not bring in new fans and it will turn off many current ones. Not to mention, it will likely incur scrutiny from politicians and antitrust lawyers alarmed to see two conferences colluding to rig a national tournament in their favor.
Anyone who lived through the BCS (1998-2013) has seen this movie before. The system for choosing the national championship participants was complicated to begin with, employing a set of manipulated computer rankings and organizers tweaked the rules seemingly every year in response to whatever controversy arose in the previous one. It was confusing, it was maddening and eventually it crumbled under the weight of congressional hearings and a book titled “Death to the BCS.”
The best way to avoid that fate is for the commissioners to declare they’re moving to a 16-team playoff, and it will be comprised of … wait for it … the top 16 teams.
But that would require the Big Ten and SEC putting the good of the sport above their self-interests. Don’t bother holding your breath.
(Photo: Jason Miller / Getty Images)
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