DESTIN, Fla. — SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said he talked with the league football coaches at length Tuesday about the importance of the conference championship game and a 16-team College Football Playoff model that would include the five highest-ranked conference champions and 11 at-large spots.
“They talked about — I’ll call it a 5+11 model — and our own ability to earn those berths,” Sankey said at the conclusion of the second day of spring meetings. “… At the coaching level, the question is, why wouldn’t that be fine? Why wouldn’t we do that? We talked about 16 with them. So, good conversation — not a destination — but the first time I’ve had the ability to go really in-depth with ideas with them.”
It was a significant pivot from the highly publicized push for automatic qualifiers, particularly from the conference’s athletic directors and coaches, and presented an unexpected alternative. Sankey and the other FBS commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua need to determine the playoff format for 2026 and beyond by Dec. 1.
It’s a deadline Sankey said wasn’t ideal for the league’s timing to decide if it wanted to stay with eight conference games or change to nine.
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“I need to make a scheduling decision in 2026,” he said, declining to give a specific date.
“So when I express frustration about delays that are happening for decisions not made, those manifest themselves both in that room. We didn’t spend time on the question what’s the criteria [for selection] look like in this new era? We just kind of sat around and it affects the timing of other decisions. We can control our scheduling decision. We can’t control every other element around this.”
Sankey said he has built some flexibility on the deadline, but added that he believes it can be made independent of CFP format and the concept of play-in games.
“You can make decisions about what you can control then you can have influence over other decisions you don’t control — you participate in,” he said. “But the timing is not what I would have designed from an optimal standpoint.”
Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin said he can’t support a nine-game conference schedule without guaranteed playoff access for the SEC.
“That’s hard for me,” he said. “… there’s not a sport that our league competes in where less than half of our members are not in the postseason except for one, and it happens to be the one we all pay the most attention to. Last year three of our 16 teams were in the playoff. I think that’s a problem systemically with the structure of what we’re trying to do.”
Not everyone in the SEC is sold on automatic qualifiers — for any team. Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin said that after seeing all of the data and analytics about who would be left out in multiple models, he thought “there’s still flaws in every system.”
He suggested a 16-team playoff with the 16 best teams and no guarantees for anyone — including conference champions.
“The best system should be 16,” he said, “and should be the 16 best.”
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