With a looming deadline on Dec. 1 for the College Football Playoff to inform ESPN of any format changes, the Power 2 conferences are not anywhere close to being on the same page.
The Big Ten and SEC currently hold all the cards as part of a contract signed early last year, but must be in lockstep if they want to expand the tournament or change a key aspect such as the number of automatic qualifiers or the selection committee process.
The Big Ten has been consistent in wanting to expand beyond the current 12-team format and involve more automatic qualifiers. Over the course of the past six months, the league has circulated several concepts for an increased field of as many as 24 or 28 teams. It would eliminate conference championship games in favor of play-in contests during the final week of the regular season and dramatically increase the number of bids for Power 4 leagues, including up to seven teams each for the Big Ten and SEC.
Meanwhile, the SEC’s preference is expansion to 16 teams while maintaining spots for the five highest-ranked conference champions (increasing the number of at-large spots to 11). This stance has been pretty steady dating back to the conference’s spring meetings in May and has also gathered the support of every other FBS league and Notre Dame—except the Big Ten.
The Big Ten has expressed extremely limited interest in a 16-team playoff from commissioner Tony Petitti on down. That has led to the current impasse.
“We have to make a decision before the end of this month if we’re going to expand to 16 next year,” Mississippi State president and CFP board of managers chair Mark Keenum said on the SEC Network last Friday. “I’ll be honest, I’m not very optimistic that we’ll get to that, but we’ll keep working on it.”
As much as the decision rests in the hands of Petitti and SEC counterpart Greg Sankey, there are also their Power 4 peers, the ACC and Big 12. While they don’t have the formal ability to chart the direction of the playoff, both of those conference commissioners have expressed their opinions and have publicly pushed back against unequal access to automatic bids in eventual expansion.
That led to slight momentum in the summer around a 16-team playoff with five automatic bids in lieu of the Big Ten’s initial proposal of eight automatic bids split between their league and the SEC, while the Big 12 and ACC had just two each (to go along with a Group of 5 bid and three at-large spots).
Yet that push largely stalled out and Petitti & Co. have moved onto other ideas.
One source tells Sports Illustrated that Big Ten athletic directors recently centered CFP discussions around a 24-team field—similar to the current NCAA FCS playoff—and addressed some of the concerns raised by the ACC and Big 12 by including an equal number of automatic bids for the entire Power 4. This concept, dubbed the 4-4-4-4-2-6 in reference to the number of bids for each league, is designed to hit on all of the major points of emphasis in terms of access and reducing a reliance on the selection committee. It could give valuable inventory to broadcasters with play-in games or by adding higher stakes to regular-season matchups.
Not coincidentally, that is also the preferred route that the Big Ten’s primary television partner has been advocating for.
“I’m very much in favor of expanding the CFP. I don’t see any reason why the CFP can’t be 24 teams,” Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks said at a conference last month. “You can fit it into the schedule. You can have automatic qualifiers from the different conferences. There’s a good model to expand the playoff, and still allow some of the Group of 5 to be able to get in. That would give the CFP the opportunity to have more networks involved. Still, with 24 teams, you wouldn’t have an enormous amount of games, but I think you can get more people promoting and marketing the playoffs than there are today.
SI previously reported Fox’s involvement behind the scenes as the impetus for the Big Ten’s format changes to the playoff.
The larger issue is the SEC simply isn’t on board and has expressed little interest in moving in that direction. Without that league open to the possibility, the entire argument reverts to the stalemate that has been ongoing for the better part of two years now.
“I’m not a big fan of automatic qualifiers,” Keenum added last week. “I think the best teams ought to play in our nation’s national tournament to determine who our national champion in college football is going to be and not have automatic bids. That’s the position of the Southeastern Conference—presidents and chancellors, our commissioner and probably most of the conferences that are part of the CFP.”
As a result, the closer we move toward Dec. 1 without any compromise or breakthrough, the closer the sport inches to keeping the status quo in place for the 2026 season and remaining at 12 teams with the five highest-ranked conference champions as automatic qualifiers.
Perhaps another controversial Selection Sunday will be the moment where one of the SEC or Big Ten compromises, but by then it will be too late to matter for next season.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as How Big Ten and SEC College Football Playoff Format Plans Differ As Deadline Looms.
