There will be no expansion of the College Football Playoff until after the current contract expires following the 2025 regular season. It feels like something of a letdown after the big announcement that a working group had come up with a 12-team model last year.
Three conferences that objected to expansion right now.
The ACC actually had a real objection to stand on: its coaches don’t want to play more games. ADs and commissioners have never had a problem with overruling coaches when they want to, but it sounds like it was a convenient enough excuse to back up the conference’s other objections.
The Big Ten also was supposedly willing to expand but only with automatic qualifying spots for power conference champions. To which I respond: if your conference champ isn’t obviously one of the 12 best teams, it should not have a reserved spot in the national title tournament. Besides, P5 champs nearly always end up in the top 12 except in very bleak years that don’t happen too often.
The Pac-12 said no because it wants a protected TV window for the Rose Bowl that wasn’t on the table at the time. The Big Ten, of course, wanted that too. It’s pretty weak sauce at this point because that can easily be added without too much trouble.
Those other objections from the ACC amount to: stuff is changing too fast, man. Let’s, like, slow it down a bit.
There has been a lot of change. NIL is less than a year old. The NCAA just adopted a new constitution. The one-time transfer rule is getting its first road test right now. Still, these commissioners get paid big bucks to make big decisions. They can suck it up and figure out a new postseason format if they want to.
It’s for similar reasons that I am not moved by objections about the money split not being worked out yet. The conferences, not the NCAA, put on the Playoff. It’s literally the commissioners’ jobs to do this. And if they wanted to expand early, they can’t break the exclusive TV deal with ESPN. Finding out how much they’d get in total is as simple as inviting some ESPN executives to the Zoom calls.
If they’d rather take it to market to get a bidding war between ESPN and Fox going, that could easily be worth the wait. That particular rationale, while it’s something we heard periodically for months, was not reportedly part of the voting this time around.
The one thing I’m most sympathetic to is the concerns about player welfare. These guys are not being paid substantial salaries like the professionals get, but the wear-and-tear on their bodies is no less real. Once the Playoff expands, the national title winning team will probably play either somewhere between 15 and 17 games depending on if they appear in a conference title game and if they get a first round bye. That’s very nearly an NFL-length workload. Shoot, they could theoretically play 18 if they have a road game at Hawaii: 12 regular season games, the bonus Hawaii game, a conference title game, and four Playoff games in the rounds of 12, 8, 4, and 2.
Especially since the expansion is likely to go backward into December rather than too far forward into January to avoid conflicting with the NFL Playoffs, I don’t know what the best solution is here. It’s true that I-AA has several rounds of playoffs, but they also have 11-game regular seasons so the champs top out at 15 games like current FBS teams do. The FBS level is more physically demanding and dangerous, though, because everyone is bigger and faster and therefore experience larger forces when hit.
They all do have to make a decision soon, because if they don’t get a new system set up by the contract’s end, there literally won’t be a Playoff. It only exists as long as a contract for it does. That’s the upshot of the sport’s postseason not being run by a pro league or the NCAA.
While the player welfare angle is real, it’s hard to see this as anything other than the other conferences being mad at the SEC for taking Oklahoma and Texas. Four of the five P5 leagues have relatively new commissioners, so they don’t have experience and trust with each other. Mike Slive and Jim Delany were often at loggerheads on many of the sport’s issues, but they had enough shared history that they knew where the other was coming from and what to expect.
The Big Ten’s Kevin Warren looked severely overmatched by his job when faced with the challenge of Covid. The ACC’s Jim Phillips and Pac-12’s George Kliavkoff are practically brand new. Greg Sankey at least had been around the college sports scene a while as Slive’s No. 2, but everyone on the power level he worked with back then is gone except the Big 12’s Bob Bowlsby. And then, taking OU and UT looked like he was knifing Bowlsby in the back while they were together on the Playoff working group that came up with the 12-team model.
Every single other power conference would’ve said yes had the Sooners and Longhorns come to them, so it’s all crocodile tears at a certain point. But if you’re a Warren or Phillips who’s never really worked with Sankey much, what would you make of it?
There will be a new contract in place before the current one ends. It probably will feature an expanded field. Maybe — big time maybe here — they extend the current terms an extra three years (to make another complete semifinal rotation) if they truly can’t decide on something in time to get the TV deal bid out.
That would be a horrible sign about the future of college sports, though, if all of the conference commissioners can’t come together over the receipt of billions of dollars.