The first 12-team College Football Playoff was always going to be a test run of sorts.
With ten games down and one to go, it has been — lopsided early-round results aside — a success, but it is also still a work in progress.
The CFP’s board of managers, which is made up of 10 FBS conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director, will meet for the first time since the new format went live on Sunday in Atlanta, the site of Monday’s national championship game between Ohio State and Notre Dame.
CFP executive director Rich Clark described this meeting, which is scheduled for about 90 minutes with just the management committee and another 90 with the presidential oversight committee, as a first step toward determining what the commissioners’ priorities are when it comes to possible changes to format. Yes, the CFP could make adjustments after just one season, though probably not the biggest potential changes, such as the number of teams in the field.
“What this is going to be is putting the things on the table that we want to talk about when we actually can sit down and have the long discussion about these things,” Clark told The Athletic. “What I think will happen is they’re going to give us some ideas. We all have some thoughts about where some changes could occur, but they’re going to give us some of those ideas, and what we’ll owe them is what the options are to change, and when those changes could actually feasibly happen. Some of them can happen next (season), but some things might have to wait until we get into the (2026 season).”
The commissioners pledged to each other that they would let the first year of the 12-team format play out before having any significant discussions among the group about what, if anything, might need adjusting.
“Remember, it’s one year, and so I don’t think anyone wants to overreact,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said. “But you have to obviously use the information you have from this first year to plan for the future.”
As SEC commissioner Greg Sankey put it, “It’s a 90-minute meeting where I would lower your expectations about outcomes.”
Any changes would require unanimous approval from the 11 members of the management committee in order to be implemented for the 2025 season. Considering how difficult it was to get all the commissioners on the same page and install the 12-team format for 2024, it is wise to keep Sankey’s comment in mind.
When the current CFP contracts expire after the 2025 season, however, the need for unanimity goes away. More ambitious and potentially divisive changes, such as adding two or four teams to the field or creating multiple automatic bids for the power conferences, become far more likely, starting in 2026. The SEC and Big Ten last spring brought up the possibility of as many as four spots being reserved for their teams.
Clark said conversations about more drastic changes also need to start — and in some cases, preferably, conclude — before the 2025 season kicks off, especially when it comes to further expansion.
“The more lead time we have on that kind of a decision, because that’s a major one, it would be very helpful to have that one decided early,” Clark said.
The topic likely to gain the most traction for immediate change is the seeding format, which created a bracket that gave Boise State, the Mountain West champion which finished ninth in the CFP committee’s final rankings, the third seed and a first-round bye, and 12th-ranked Arizona State, the Big 12 winner, the fourth seed and a bye.
The trickle-down seeding effect resulted in No. 1 Oregon facing Ohio State, the winner of the No. 8 vs. No. 9 first-round game against Tennessee, in the quarterfinals. Meanwhile, sixth-seeded Penn State, which lost the Big Ten title game to Oregon, reached the semifinals by playing SMU and Boise State, two teams ranked behind Ohio State in the committee’s final Top 25.
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The 12-team format was unveiled in the summer of 2021 after about a year in development and a pause because of the pandemic. There was a Power 5 back then. Texas and Oklahoma were in the Big 12. The Pac-12 had USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington. The American Athletic Conference had Houston and UCF, which both won New Year’s Six bowl games, and Cincinnati, which was good enough to make the four-team Playoff in ‘21.
A format that reserved six spots for conference champions, including the top-four seeds and first-round byes, made sense then.
By the time the four-team format debuted, conference realignment turned the P5 into a P4, tearing apart the Pac-12 and consolidating power even more in the SEC and Big Ten. This season’s final committee top four, Oregon (Pac-12), Georgia (SEC), Texas (Big 12) and Penn State (Big Ten), would have nicely filled out top four seeds if they were still representing their 2023 conferences.
The only CFP format adjustment made after the realignment shuffle was trimming the number of auto-bids reserved for conference champions from six to five.
Of course, not everybody looked at that funky bracket revealed on Dec. 8 as a problem.
“So my first starting place is, look, it’s too soon,” said Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez, whose predecessor Craig Thompson was among the architects of the current format in a working group alongside former Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, former Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick and Sankey. “I understand what happened, and certainly we were beneficiary this year, and I’m open to talking about that. But a sample size of one year seems small. However, open to the conversation. OK, if we are tweaking, what would it look like?”
Nevarez pointed out that honoring conference championships was one of the pillar principles of CFP expansion, in part to keep an emphasis on the regular season and each league’s title race and in part to protect the value of lucrative league championship games. From that standpoint: Mission accomplished this season.
“The whole enterprise, I think, was better for it,” Nevarez said.
The CFP’s seeding system is unlike anything else in college sports and has been a little tricky for fans to get their heads around. Basketball conference champions receive automatic bids to March Madness, but that championship only provides entry to the field and does not guarantee anything related to seeding. That could be an alternative for the management committee to consider.
“It’s really important to identify the goal that you’re trying to accomplish,” Sun Belt commissioner Keith Gill said. “So I would say, if our No. 1 goal is to make sure that it’s easy to understand to the layperson, then maybe you choose a more simple route. But if our goal is to honor conference champions, then maybe that’s not possible.”
Phillips noted the CFP format is similar to the NFL’s, where the 14-3 Vikings played a road playoff game against the 10-7 Rams because Minnesota finished second in the NFC North and Los Angeles won the NFC West.
“It doesn’t mean that it’s the end-all be-all,” Phillips said. “But I just want to make sure that there’s a point of reference that this is what they do at the highest level of football. But that being said, yes, it should be discussed. It should be talked about, but I’m not interested in just doing it in a vacuum where it’s the only thing that we discuss.”
Complaints have swirled about early-round blowouts in the first 12-team CFP, but Phillips noted 20 of the 30 Playoff games played in the four-team format were decided by double-digits, and plenty were hugely lopsided. This Playoff produced two semifinals that weren’t decided until late in the fourth quarter. Also notable: Only one of the six NFL wild-card games last weekend was decided by fewer than 12 points.
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Expect the selection process and the game sites to also be discussed in the coming months. The commissioners have mostly refrained from publicly critiquing the selection committee’s work this season, and that probably falls into the bucket of items that could use another year’s worth of information before deciding whether the process needs changing.
As for game sites, while the home games in the first round at Notre Dame, Texas, Penn State and Ohio State provided electric atmospheres and great visuals for television, doing more of them could be challenging.
“Now, if you were to do those games 10 days later, you might find a different atmosphere,” Clark said. “I know that the schools start to shut down. Weather starts to get worse. The logistics could be a little bit different than they were at that point. My sense of it was that we walked that right up to the edge of when that game could happen successfully.”
MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said the group should avoid any “knee-jerk reactions” to year one of the 12-team Playoff.
Steinbrecher’s time in these meetings goes back to the days of the Bowl Championship Series, which became wildly unpopular at least in part because it was constantly being “fixed”.
“One of the ways the BCS started running into some difficulties were annual tweaks to the system,” he said. “There may or may not be reasons to make changes. I won’t presuppose any of that. All I’m saying is we need to be thoughtful of that so we don’t find ourselves in a similar position.”
(Photo: Jack Gorman / Getty Images)
