Running into eventual National Champion Ohio State in their home stadium was a tough first-round draw for Tennessee last December.
While the Vols and the Buckeyes were both two of the top seven teams in the regular season, Tennessee and Ohio State matched up in the 8/9 game due to Boise State and Arizona State jumping up to Top 4 seeds as conference champions in the Mountain West and the Big 12, respectively.
That may not be the case moving forward, though.
According to a report from ESPN’s Heather Dinich this week, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti are both in favor of changes to “the way teams are seeded in the 12-team College Football Playoff” this fall.
Dinich’s report states that Sankey said that he is “prepared to vote for seeding change, but it has to be unanimous.”
One popular idea amongst college football fans is seeding which directly stems from the CFB Playoff rankings. That means that the four highest-ranked teams would get the four top seeds, regardless of conference champions. The model would still make room for the five highest-ranked conference champions, according to Dinich.
“We’re in favor of going to a straight seeding, where there’s no difference between rankings and seeding like we had this year,” Petitti said via Dinich and ESPN. “We’re in support of that for next year.”
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While points are awarded for ambition in the first iteration of the 12-team playoff, too many unbalanced games arose due to the favor of conference champions. No one can predict which games will be competitive and which games won’t, but the straight-seeding change could make good headway into creating a more balanced playoff format.
Sankey and Petitti’s comments came after a “joint meeting between athletic directors representing their respective conferences on Wednesday,” according to Dinich.
More meetings and joint conferences will take place over the offseason as the sport prepares for potential changes to the 2025 playoff format, but it does appear as though the big players at the table are on board with productive changes after the inaugural 12-team version played out this past winter.
Let’s play hypothetical for a moment and pretend that a straight-seeding format was used for the 2024 12-team playoffs. In that situation, Tennessee would’ve drawn the 7-seed as the No. 7 team in the post-conference championship rankings. The Vols would’ve still played in the first round but would have hosted No. 10 SMU rather than a visit to Ohio State.
A win over No. 10 SMU would have hypothetically set up Tennessee for a second-round game against 2-seed Georgia at a neutral site.
For more on Sankey and Petitti’s comments about the College Football Playoffs, check out Heather Dinich’s article for ESPN here.
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