NEW ORLEANS — The commissioners of the Big Ten Conference and the Southeastern Conference said they will push for something closer to “straight seeding” in the College Football Playoff during the 2025 season to give less of a break to lower-ranked league champions and better reflect how teams are ranked by the CFP selection committee.
“I’m prepared to vote for seeding change,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. “But it has to be unanimous.”
At least for next season, anyway.
Sankey and Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, speaking after Wednesday’s joint meetings in New Orleans with their conferences’ 34 athletic directors (the Big Ten has 18 schools, while the SEC has 16) acknowledged their leagues ultimately will be driving changes in the CFP format after the 2025 season.
However, they declined to address details of anything related to 2026 or beyond that might have been discussed, topics that likely include expansion of the CFP (which became a 12-team bracket this past season after spending its first 10 seasons as a four-team invitational) and more automatic bids for their own conferences.
Sankey said those negotiations should include leaders of all the conferences — a CFP gathering in Dallas next week will include everyone — but that the Big Ten and SEC can certainly be trusted to keep everyone’s interests in mind.
“If I was just representing the SEC, we’d still have a four-team playoff,” said Sankey, whose own conference’s addition last summer of Oklahoma and Texas from the Big 12 was part of a nationwide shift that added uncertainty to college sports. “It was neither our idea, nor was it our commentary, nor was it our need — even post expansion.
“My view is the 12-team playoff last year helped everybody’s regular season, or brought people into the conversation. From my seat, we’ve deployed leadership in a responsible way.”
While the first 12-team CFP was largely viewed as a success, a provision that rewarded first-round byes to the four highest-ranked major conference champions drew scrutiny after all four of those teams — Arizona State of the Big 12, Boise State of the Mountain West, Georgia of the SEC and Oregon of the Big Ten — lost their CFP openers in the quarterfinals. That started the portion of the playoff that utilized bowl games to set up the national championship game after first-round games were hosted by higher seeds at on-campus stadiums.
Seventh-seeded Notre Dame, which has a seat at the CFP table as the sport’s most powerful independent program, and eighth-seeded Ohio State each won three playoff games to reach the title game in Atlanta a month ago. The Big Ten’s Buckeyes beat Notre Dame 34-23, winning their program’s ninth national championship and denying the Fighting Irish what would have been their 12th such title but first since the 1988 season.
Petitti said both conferences are in favor of going to “straight seeding” to ensure “there’s no difference between rankings and seedings.”
“The committee just puts in for the 12 teams next year, just says, ‘These are the 12 teams in the order that they fall,’ based on their judgment and the criteria they’re given in the selection room,” Petitti said. “That would give the committee more flexibility to really do the job in probably a much clearer way for fans.”
An exception still would occur when one of the five highest-ranked conference champions from the Football Bowl Subdivision is ranked outside the top 12. That team would get in next season, as Clemson did last season as the Atlantic Coast Conference champion despite being 16th among the final 25 teams ranked by the CFP selection committee.
While the CFP contract from 2026 through the 2031 season requires the Big Ten and SEC to consult other leagues about prospective changes to the playoff system, it also provides them with the ability to impose changes they both want.
What sort of leverage that might provide them might be better understood after next week’s meetings in Dallas, where a unanimous vote would be needed on any shift in seeding for 2025.
After that, “the process going forward, if we decided to make changes, contemplates that the structure of that is led by the SEC and the Big Ten,” Petitti explained. “So it requires (the SEC and Big Ten) to get to consensus to make a meaningful recommendation, if any, to our colleagues in the (other) leagues, and also requires us to get their input and to speak with them, to give them an opportunity to weigh in on whatever it is that we’re thinking about.”
Sankey said his conference still is considering going to a nine-game regular season the way the Big Ten does, a move that could potentially help SEC teams’ strength of schedule.
Meanwhile, Petitti portrayed reports of tension between conference commissioners as overblown, insisting they’ve been working together on the biggest topic consuming college sports: the House v. NCAA settlement, which is poised to reshape everything by allowing schools to pay players directly.
Said Petitti: “The work that’s been done around the settlement among the conferences is probably unprecedented in terms of the amount of collaboration that’s required to get this right.”