The College Football Playoff expanded to 12 teams. There is a time and a place for this.
Despite his league winning 12 of the last 16 national championships, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said one of the most important components of an expanded 12-team College Football Playoff would be helping the sport not be so regional.
According to Sankey, how do you bring more people into the month of November? Our league would not be affected by a four-team playoff. We took half the field at 14. No one else has done that. We won't have less opportunity if we add Texas and Oklahoma. There's going to be more.
The West Coast and all of the west of the Rockies have not been included. The responsibility we all have is to make college football strong.
Sankey was a member of the College Football Playoff working group, and after another wave of realignment in August that included USC and UCLA moving from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten, there is a renewed push to speed up the proposed 12-team playoff. The current format of four teams is in place through the end of the television contract.
Since the introduction of the College Football Playoff, Oregon and Washington have made the playoffs. SEC teams have appeared in all eight playoffs. In the last two years, Alabama and Georgia have played each other in the championship game.
Sankey said that they have a responsibility to think about the game from a bigger picture. I'm not going to apologize for wanting to win, but I'm going to challenge myself and the rest of the team to think about the bigger picture.
Sankey said that it doesn't mean that more teams will win titles. Alabama, Georgia, LSU, and Ohio State have all won a title during the current iteration of theCFP.
You could have as many as 40 teams with a chance to make the playoffs if you go to 12.
Sankey said the main obstacles are lining up bowl dates, campus involvement, interaction of TV networks, not bumping up against the NFL and not extending the playoffs too far into January. The current proposal is the same one that was first revealed in June 2021.
Sankey said that rather than walk through the issues for the past year, people just said no.
Things suddenly changed. People have to come to the table to make it happen.
"After the last year, I don't use the word confident a lot," Sankey said when asked if he was more confident than a year ago.
Sankey said that the SEC supports expansion.
The presidents said they were going to control the decision, but you had clamoring from every corner but ours about expansion, either at the commissioner or president level on the board. We worked through a process and were told to present a model as a working group. We did what was asked and tried not to. We're not able to do that.
The college football model is the same as it was before the Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC were added.
Sankey thinks motivation changed over the summer.
Sankey said the SEC would be fine with what he called "no conference- directed access" to the playoff, but also understands the value of conference titles.
"If you're the sixth best conference or seventh best conference and it's close, you've got three or four teams vying for a championship in each, which is great for the sport," Sankey said.
According to Sankey, the first person to tell him that 12 teams was the correct number was the former Tennessee athletic director.
Sankey said that Doug called him to say that it needed to be 12 teams. I didn't tell people I thought 12 teams was the correct structure. Doug kind of reinforced what I was thinking, that we needed to think beyond the six or eight teams that were out there.
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