Air Force’s Clark next CFP leader
IRVING, Texas — Lt. Gen. Richard Clark, the superintendent of the Air Force Academy, will be the next executive director of the College Football Playoff.
Clark will replace Bill Hancock, who is retiring, and will take over as the playoff prepares for its expansion to a 12-team format in the 2024 season. The playoff for the Football Bowl Subdivision, NCAA Division I’s upper tier, has been a four-team bracket since it debuted in the 2014 season and will have two semifinals and a title game one last time this season under Hancock’s direction.
Hancock’s impending retirement from the position was announced in June. Clark’s selection was announced Friday in a CFP release.
“Gen. Clark’s experience leading the U.S. Air Force Academy as a Three-Star General and also being a four-year letter winner with the U.S Air Force Football team gives him a strong background to excel in this crucial leadership role,” Mark Keenum, the president of Mississippi State University and the chairman of the CFP Board of Managers, said in the release.
From 1989 to 2002, Hancock served as the first fulltime director of the Final Four for the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament. In October 2005, he became the first administrator of the Bowl Championship Series, the playoff forerunner that lasted from the 1998 season to the 2013 season; his title became executive director in November 2009.
He was named executive director of the CFP in November 2012, and as the organization’s only employee at the time, he was charged with finalizing a media rights agreement, negotiating agreements with bowl games and host cities, building a staff and forming a selection committee. The first four-team playoff featured Alabama, Oregon, Florida State and Ohio State — seeded in that order — and ended with Ohio State beating Oregon for the national championship.
For more than a quartercentury, Hancock has been at the heart of major changes to big-time college football’s process for awarding a national title.
“The BCS for the first time gave an opportunity to decide a national champion on the field every year, not just at the whims of the bowl pairings,” Hancock said in December 2022.
He will stay on until February 2025 to aid in the transition. Like Keenum, Clark thanked Hancock in the release and said he was leaving “big shoes to fill.”
Clark also said it will be hard to leave the military after 38 years: “College football is an American tradition unlike any other. Especially now, as the Playoff is expanding from four teams to 12 teams, this is an exciting time for fans and everyone involved in this great game.”