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The first year of the 12-team College Football Playoff was a success, as teams battled throughout the regular season to make it into the expanded field before providing fans with a dramatic postseason. However, the world of college football is already looking for tweaks and improvements.
Expansion has been a hot topic once again this summer, with plenty of discussion happening surrounding the CFP potentially going to 16 teams or changing the selection criteria to give more automatic bids to the SEC and the Big Ten.
Other conferences, namely the Big 12 and the ACC, are obviously not the biggest fans of this. However, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey thinks that expansion is positive and should continue, via Nicole Auerbach of NBC Sports.
“We think growth beyond 12 can be positive and should be pursued,” Sankey said.
Sankey expanded on those thoughts, highlighting some of the lesser-known programs who got into the CFP last season who would not have been included or even considered in previous editions, where only four teams were selected.
“What happened through the 12-team College Football Playoff is we brought teams into the conversation at a time when they would have been talking about their bowl games,” Sankey added.
One of the biggest barriers to expansion at this point in time is the discrepancy between the conference schedule in the SEC and in the other power conferences. At the moment, the SEC plays just eight conference games while the other power conferences play nine, putting them at an inherent disadvantage due to the imbalanced schedule.
Even the Big Ten, widely regarded as the other toughest conference in the nation, plays nine conference games. It's understandable that the other conferences have no interest in expanding the playoff or giving the SEC auto-bids until it adds that nine conference games.
According to Greg Sankey, the CFP selection criteria must be tweaked in order for the SEC to add another conference game.
“We will continue to evaluate increasing the number of SEC games from eight to nine,” Sankey wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “As I have said repeatedly, understanding how the CFP will evaluate ‘strength of schedule' and ‘strength of record' is a critically important part of our football schedule decision making.”
The potential schedule change will be a talking point throughout the rest of the offseason, but Sankey doesn't seem ready to budge just yet.
