Last week, Big Ten leaders collectively pushed their chips all the way in on a 24-team College Football Playoff format. The league’s football coaches said that they supported doubling the size of the current CFP bracket, and commissioner Tony Petitti met with reporters to make the case for it.
Now, attention turns to the Southeastern Conference for its response.
SEC coaches and administrators will meet this week in Destin, Fla., at the league’s spring meetings, and discussions surrounding the future of the CFP will be front and center. Any changes are to be made to the CFP’s format, the Big Ten and SEC must both agree to make them — which also means each holds veto power over the other.
So, the SEC could stop a 24-team CFP if it decides it wants to. Or it can green light it, which could pave the way for a 24-team field as early as the 2027 season.
We’ll find out soon which way the SEC truly leans.
“What you will hear … is a lot of our coaches, a lot of our athletic directors, and probably some others, think 24 is the right direction,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said last week on The Paul Finebaum Show. “What we’ve said is that could ultimately be the proper direction. We just don’t think you leap to that without information. And research and understanding the marketplace informs that decision.”
Until now, the biggest bracket Sankey has publicly supported has been 16. He’s also backed the current 12-team format, which just completed its second year. But a few of his coaches — Georgia’s Kirby Smart and Tennessee’s Josh Heupel — have both expressed support for a 24-team field.
“I think 24 teams is good for the fan bases,” Smart said back in February. “When coaches and ADs look at it, we’re looking at our fan bases having an expectation that they want to be in the playoffs — it’s playoffs or bust.”
That’s part of Petitti’s pitch, too. He believes increased access helps more programs across the country, because it gives them a realistic shot at making the CFP — which is the way college football defines a successful season.
“When I was at [Major League] Baseball, we never had to convince anybody that keeping more teams in the race is better for everybody and the fans, like we never had to do that,” Petitti said. “I feel like in this space, like we’re kind of being asked to do that. It’s almost counterintuitive. I think that more teams alive as late as possible is a fundamental way that I thought about it.”
Rutgers athletic director Keli Zinn, who worked at LSU as the deputy athletic director up until last summer, told The Athletic last week she thinks there is more support for a 24-team bracket within the SEC than the public may perceive. It’s also likely we’ll hear from more football coaches staring down their first season with a nine-game SEC schedule — which means half the league will pick up an extra loss this fall, too. That could become a significant pressure point in the debate.
Ultimately, we’ll learn quite a bit about where the expansion conversation goes from here, and whether conference championship games get impacted by decisions. Petitti said he thinks the money gained from expanding the CFP would offset the loss of revenue tied to conference title games (which he estimated to be more than $200 million for the Power 4). But unwinding those title game contracts to allow for a total reimagining of the postseason calendar — and securing new contracts for dates and locations for the additional inventory — would be a heavy lift.
That is, if the SEC is on board with his league’s proposal. Because the SEC can stop a 24-team Playoff, just like the Big Ten stopped a 16-team Playoff last year. If neither league can win over the other, the status quo reigns, and the CFP stays at 12.
“We’ve had zero conversation about 16,” Petitti said. “Plan B is what we have now. We would stay with what we have now.”
