Missouri sixth-year football coach Eli Drinkwitz wants to expand the College Football Playoff.
To be more precise, he wouldn’t mind nearly tripling it.
Drinkwitz’s 30-minute media session Thursday was the most entertaining of the 16 Southeastern Conference coaches this week as the league’s annual media days event concluded in Atlanta. He did not hold back when asked about the sport’s postseason, which implemented a 12-team playoff for the first time last year and is expected to expand to either 14 or 16 teams for the 2026 season.
“This is not going to do me any favors with our commissioner,” Drinkwitz said, “but when I think about college football right now and what we need to do, I think it comes down to what’s best for our players and what’s best for our fans. The rest of us are really only important because of the players and the fans. We’ve decided to go into this expansion of the playoffs, and we’re trying to follow an NFL model, but the NFL takes 44% of its teams into the playoffs to increase the passion or to keep the fan bases engaged.
“If we’re talking about 12 teams (out of 136 Bowl Subdivision programs), that’s 9%, while 14 is 11% and 16 is 12%. It’s really not changing the math for the fan bases. We also have a human committee that has no standard set structure of how they’re going to select the teams. They’re all human beings who all have implicit bias.”