TAMPA, Fla. — A year later, Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz looks ahead of his time. He just wishes everyone had paid more attention to what he actually said.
It was at SEC media days last year when Drinkwitz proposed what was then a massive expansion of the College Football Playoff, to either 24 or 30 teams. This was when the decision-makers were all but settled on going from 12 to 16 teams, disagreeing only on the format.
Now the debate is over whether to expand to 24 teams, with the SEC the lone Power 4 holdout in wanting only 16. But the selection committee would pick almost all of the spots in the 24-team format, which is not what Drinkwitz proposed a year ago, or favors now.
“I was one of the first to come up with a certain idea, and somebody totally screwed it up,” Drinkwitz said Monday. “I am not for giving the committee more opportunities to put teams in the Playoff. As nice as I can be about it, committees are a bad idea.”
Drinkwitz’s proposal is for automatic bids, based on conference play-in games: The conference championship games would stay, and in addition each conference would hold play-in games for Playoff bids.
That was actually the original 16-team idea put forth by Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti in early 2025: The winners of the SEC and Big Ten championship games would get the top two seeds, and the losers would make the Playoff with a lower seed. Then there would be games between the No. 3 and No. 6 seeds, and the No. 4 and No. 5 seeds, with the winners getting in. The ACC and Big 12 would get two spots and hold play-in games for those. The Group of 6 would get one bid, and a committee would pick the final three at-large teams.
Drinkwitz then expanded on that during his SEC media days appearance last year in Atlanta, giving eight teams in the SEC and Big Ten a chance on play-in weekend, and four teams in the ACC and Big 12.
But as the year went on, the play-in idea subsided. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey told The Athletic late last year that administrators didn’t want “another layer” of games to get into the Playoff.
Drinkwitz, however, is undeterred.
“I think each conference should have play-in games that create the opportunity to get into the playoffs,” Drinkwitz said. “That’s how I see it — I think it would create more excitement avenues for your fans to be excited. I think if the top eight teams in your conference had an opportunity to play in the playoffs, that gives you a measuring stick for each fan base that makes sense.”
And a benefit of this, Drinkwitz pointed out, would be keeping conference championship games. It’s expected they would go away if the CFP expands to 24, although Sankey on Monday did not commit to that, pointing out the SEC was alone in having a championship game for several years after creating it in 1992.
Either way, Drinkwitz wants them to stay.
“Conference championships are important and need to be preserved,” Drinkwitz said. “They’re highly entertaining. They’re highly valuable from a monetary standpoint. And they’re highly valuable from the fan engagement standpoint. So throwing those away so we get a bad matchup between 24 and 18 doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
