Impasse sets playoff format at 4 teams through 2025
Not expanding the College Football Playoff sooner won’t make it easier to expand it later.
“In fact, I think it becomes more complicated,” SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey told the Associated Press on Friday.
The CFP is set to remain a four-team format through the 2025 season after the administrators who manage the postseason failed to agree on a plan to expand before the current contracts run out.
What started with an enthusiastic unveiling of a plan for a 12-team playoff last summer has come to a halt. The college sports leaders tasked with working out the details are at an impasse.
“Seems like everyone says they’re committed to expand the CFP, but it’s hard to believe that because we can’t expand the CFP,” Sun Belt Commissioner Keith Gill told the AP.
The management committee, comprised of 10 conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director, met by video conference earlier this week.
“Time was running out,” American Athletic Conference Commissioner Mike Aresco said. “The disappointment also stems from the fact that I think we will eventually get there and I think 12-team is still the most likely scenario.”
Aresco, who released a letter Monday detailing the obstacles to expansion, said the purpose of this week’s meeting was to determine if anyone’s position had changed. The answer was no.
“So at that point, I guess the implications were clear,” Aresco said.
The university presidents who make up the Board of Managers on Thursday accepted the commissioners’ recommendation to abandon the idea of early implementation and directed them to keep working on a new format for the 2026 season.
“After 2025 there is no playoff,” Aresco said.
This process actually started after the 2018 season. With calls for expansion already coming — mostly from the Pac-12 and Big Ten — the presidents asked the management committee for a plan for the next evolution of the CFP. The hope was it could be implemented a few years early instead of waiting for the 12-year media rights deal with ESPN to run out.
Sankey was part of the fourperson subcommittee that produced the 12-team proposal after two years of work. The plan called for the field to be comprised of the six highestranked conference champions in FBS and six at-large teams determined by selection committee rankings. The top four seeds would get byes. Four first-round games would be played on the home fields of the higher-ranked teams. Quarterfinals and semifinals would be hosted by bowl games.
Sankey said the group sifted through more than 60 playoff models.
“We’ve identified, already, solutions to some of the concerns identified,” Sankey said. “What strikes me as unfortunate is people haven’t wanted to act on those as they protect their own interests.”
The decision to shelve early expansion came as no surprise. The commissioners left their last in-person meetings in early January gridlocked, frustrated and unable to produce the unanimous consensus needed to move forward.
A few days after the meetings in Indianapolis, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips took the strongest public stance yet against early expansion, saying a new CFP format should not be a priority with so much uncertainty throughout college sports.
On Friday, the commissioners made it official, announcing they had given up on trying to implement expansion for the final two years of the ESPN deal — a failure that will cost the conferences an estimated $450 million in additional revenue.
The road to expansion appeared to be much smoother eight months ago, when the CFP unveiled the 12-team plan.
About a month later, it was revealed the SEC was in talks with Texas and Oklahoma to leave the Big 12 and join the powerhouse league that has produced 12 of the past 17 national champions.
Relatively new commissioners in the Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC, already leery of a process that started before they were involved with the CFP, became even more disillusioned after learning of the SEC’s expansion plan.
Since then progress has stalled, despite more than half a dozen in-person meetings with the commissioners.