So much for settling into college football’s new postseason format.
Only two years after the College Football Playoff tripled from four to 12 teams, the Big Ten, the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Big 12 are pushing to double the field to 24 for the 2027 season. Not on board currently for the 24-team concept is the Southeastern Conference, which is conducting its spring meetings this week at the Hilton Sandestin in the Florida panhandle.
“If you ask enough people, they want an opportunity to be in the party, and if they don’t make the party, they get fired,” Georgia’s Kirby Smart, now the dean of SEC coaches, said Tuesday in a press conference. “Then they’re worried about the party and not the dilution of the market. There are competing interests here that I think are unfortunate. I don’t want it to be a diluted market.
“There will be games that lose some of their meaning leading up to it, but maybe there are more great games in the 24-team model than there are in the 12 or 16. I don’t know. I’m not here to decide how many teams should be in it. I would much rather talk about how the teams are decided that are in it.”
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey does not anticipate a CFP decision this week, adding that there is plenty of time for that.
“Four to 12 was monumental, but I think it was justifiable,” Sankey said Monday night in a press conference. “You have to be careful in how far you want to go. If you go back from the move from four to 12, we never had a unanimous vote. I don’t think we would have a unanimous vote right now on the number.”
The primary reason for expanding again so soon mirrors the argument from the last time around — a larger field keeps more fan bases invested deeper into the regular season. There certainly is the potential for more money to be made via television, though it’s not known whether such an increase would be significant.
UPPING THE PARTY
Had a 24-team playoff been implemented in 2014 instead of the four-team concept, a whopping 80 different schools would have made at least one appearance. Alabama and Ohio State would have been in all 12 playoffs, but Appalachian State, Liberty and San Jose State would have tasted the experience as well.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips recently said that 24 teams “sells hope” to programs that typically reside in the middle to lower tiers of their respective leagues. An SEC example would be Mississippi State, which hasn’t won the conference since 1941 but would have been in four of the last 12 playoffs had there been 24 teams.
One of Sankey’s chief concerns with 24 teams is whether those already locked into the playoffs with a game or two remaining would rest players, which the NFL experiences from time to time.
“When we were at four, you would have teams effectively eliminated from consideration in September, and good teams,” Sankey said. “Oklahoma last year was a really good example. In the old four-team format, that’s a team that’s out, but on November 1st, they played up in Knoxville and had a really tough schedule. That was a really good example of a schedule in November helping a team earn its way into the playoff.
“If we went to 24, maybe one or two of those games don’t matter in the same way. Rivalry games will matter, but if you’ve got a player who needs to rest because they’re already in the 24 — these are some of the things we want to try and understand this week.”
Protecting the importance of the regular season has always been a chief argument against expansion, but the two-year sample size of the 12-team playoff seems to be keeping that importance intact. Within the first three weeks of last season, Ohio State beat Texas, Oklahoma defeated Michigan and Texas A&M rallied past Notre Dame.
Each of those three winners reached the playoff, while the three losers missed out in the end.
“I’ve heard the arguments from obviously 12, and I know 12, 16, and 24 seem to be the most popular, right?” Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer said Wednesday. “I can make an argument for all of them. I know that for me it’s really not about a number. It’s about just trying to win every football game, so you don’t have to put it in a committee’s hands, and that’s our goal as a program at Alabama.”
Texas A&M coach Mike Elko jokingly threw out a 40-team field and said, “Then I won’t get fired. It’s OK to make it hard to get to the playoff. None of us are answering for the good of the sport. We’re answering for the good of ourselves.”
Then there was the response of Auburn first-year coach and former Tennessee offensive coordinator Alex Golesh.
“Nobody in that room cares what I think about the College Football Playoff,” Golesh said. “I hope at some point maybe some people will. The College Football Playoff is literally the last thing I’ve thought about since I took the job at Auburn.”
SHIFTING SCHEDULE
Expanding the playoff to 24 teams, where both first- and second-round games would be on campus sites, likely would involve moving the season up a week to the Saturday before Labor Day weekend, which is a move Sankey only supports should it provide two open dates during the regular season. Then there is talk of eliminating conference championship games to accommodate the larger field.
When asked how committed the SEC is to keeping its league title game, which has been around since 1992, Sankey said, “We have contracts, so it’s pretty committed.”
The SEC championship game generates more than $50 million in revenue annually, and the past two SEC title games have averaged 16.6 million viewers, dwarfing the 9.9 million that CFP first-round matchups have averaged.
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This time last year, conferences were discussing an expansion to 14 or 16 teams, but Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti recently said that his league is either for expanding to 24 or staying at 12.
“I was surprised by that since they brought 16 to the table,” Sankey said. “When we were meeting last year, all those 16 ideas? They weren’t ours.”
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.