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This decision was almost inevitable.
It had been trending that way for months, and Friday the word came down that the College Football Playoff would, sadly, not expand as had been hoped. No agreement could be reached on a new format and, therefore, the CFP will stick with the current four-team system.
That’s not why this is bad for college football, although let’s be clear: The status quo is terrible for anyone not aligned with the powerhouse SEC. It means more of the same teams, year after year, deciding a champion.
But let’s not kid ourselves about the future, either. If everyone couldn’t get on the same page about expanding now after a series of meetings and lengthy debates, why would that suddenly happen when the current contract ends following the 2025 season? AAC commissioner Mike Aresco, while believing expansion will happen at that time, said doubts are “reasonable skepticism.”
The management committee, made up of the 10 FBS commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, failed to come up with a unanimous agreement. And so, after a video conference on Wednesday, they recommended to the Board of Managers — the 11 presidents and chancellors — to hold off on expansion. That was approved on Thursday.
Just listen to SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, one of the most powerful men in all of college football, on where expansion stands now. He told Sports Illustrated on Friday that his conference, which had supported a 12-team playoff, might have to ch ange its stance.
“If we can’t make the decision now around a format that was widely acclaimed as innovative and creative and met a wide variety of needs, we’re all going to have to go back and rethink that,” he said.
Sankey went on to say that he believes the current format is “fine,” pointing to three different champions the past three seasons. That is true, to a point.
In the eight years of the playoff, five different teams have won the title. But only six have reached the title game. The Pac-12 was last involved in 2017. The Big 12 was left out the past two years. An SEC team has played in the championship every year but one, and the title game has featured two SEC teams twice: this past season and 2017. This past season was the first time since 2016 that the playoff included two new participants and the first time a non-Power Five school — Cincinnati of the AAC — was included.
Last June, a proposed 12-team format was recommended by a playoff working group, creating optimism that expansion was on the horizon. The format included the six highest-ranked conference champions and six at-large teams, determined by the selection committee’s rankings.
It didn’t take off as expected, due to a variety of different opinions from those in power. Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren favors automatic bids for the Power Five conference champions. The Group of Five commissioners are against that. ACC commissioner Jim Phillips has said his league didn’t believe this was the right time to expand and was focused on other issues, such as the name, image and likeness policy and the transfer portal. George Kliavkoff, from the Pac-12, wants the Rose Bowl to keep its New Year’s Day time slot under any proposal. Aresco admitted Oklahoma and Texas leaving for the SEC was an “earthquake” that derailed some of the momentum of expansion. And now Sankey, who was part of that working group, may be rethinking it. As he has said, the SEC doesn’t need expansion.
The sport, however, does need it. It has become too much about the south. Only once has a team from a different region — Ohio State in the first year of the playoff — won it all. Only a handful of teams have reasonable expectations to be among the four that will decide a championship. Expansion made enough sense that a working group was established to create a proposal.
“It’s frustrating it didn’t get resolved this time around. I really think it should’ve been, when you have a strong majority that favored the [12-team playoff],” Aresco said.
But then self interests got in the way, leading to the preservation of the status quo. As unfortunate as that is, the bigger worry is what will happen in 2026. Eight months ago, expansion seemed a certainty. Since then, however, confidence of adding teams to the playoff, even four years from now, has fallen significantly.
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