More massive changes are coming to college football. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, in conjunction with the Big Ten, are pushing for a 14 or 16-team College Football Playoff - a format that will likely take effect in 2026 or 2027 - with at least four automatic bids each for the two power conferences.
If you were in a coma for the last 10 years, you'd be waking up to a sport that was completely unrecognizable from where it was. The damage has already been done, but further damage will continue to come.
Sankey has made veiled threats about pulling the SEC out of the NCAA entirely. Every decision that has gotten made over the last few years has not been in the best interest of fans of the sport.
The playoff field will never be big enough to satisfy everyone. Expansion of the playoff has always had Alabama right at the forefront.
A playoff was always going to happen, but the process was significantly accelerated when Alabama got a rematch with LSU in 2011 for the BCS title. When only two teams got a shot to play for the national title, leaders of other conferences couldn't stand both teams being from the SEC, even when it was obvious the league had the two best teams in the country.
Further expansion - and format changes - can be traced back to the SEC only getting three teams in the 12-team playoff field this past season. The Crimson Tide was the first team left out of the playoff last season, with teams such as SMU and Indiana, which played much weaker schedules overall, earning a bid over Alabama.
We told you at the time that Sankey and Alabama AD Greg Byrne wouldn't sit idly at the snub. Changes were always coming in the aftermath of that decision by the committee.
A 9-game SEC schedule may not be happening
Many expect that once there's an agreed upon new format for the College Football Playoff, particularly if it includes guaranteed bids for the SEC, the league will finally relent and move to a 9-game schedule. It's always made sense fiscally; of course, Sankey would want a ninth game for the revenue boost.
But he's going to get nothing but push back from his member institutions until the criteria for making the playoff is laid out in a manner that doesn't punish you for losing to better teams.
“You have a team that played four games against teams with 6-6 records last year that got in,” Sankey said in Destin at SEC spring meetings. “Another team didn’t play really anybody at the top of its conference was selected in.
“And it’s clear that not losing becomes, in many ways, more important than beating the University of Georgia, which two of our teams were left out did.”
Sankey is referring to both Alabama and Ole Miss, which beat Georgia but finished 9-3. In the interest of fairness, it wasn't necessarily the number of losses that doomed Kalen DeBoer and Lane Kiffin. It was who they lost to.
Alabama lost two games to teams with six regular season losses, Vanderbilt and Oklahoma. Ole Miss lost to 4-8 Kentucky. Those aren't games you can lose and still make a legitimate argument you deserved inclusion in the playoff. You can only blame yourself.
That's not to say both teams weren't more deserving than SMU or Indiana. Those teams skated by on weak schedules and never really had to beat anyone of note. The grind of the SEC, regardless of what fans from other conferences want to believe, is different.
Sankey may ultimately be the villain in this story. He undoubtedly will be in the eyes of fans outside of the SEC landscape. But it's a role Sankey is willing to play in order to ensure favorable treatment for the league that has dominated the sport for the last quarter century.