Despite having plenty of momentum earlier this offseason, it appears the idea to grant multiple automatic bids to conferences in the future College Football Playoff is dead on arrival.
The proposal to give certain conferences automatic qualifiers in any future playoff format is “not going to happen,” ESPN college football insider Pete Thamel has predicted.
“The 4-4-2-2 thing is not going to happen,” Thamel said on the College GameDay podcast, referring to the idea of giving the SEC and Big Ten four places each and two each to the Big 12 and ACC.
Until recently, it appeared little stood in the way of the SEC and Big Ten and their desire to award themselves those automatic bids, and that the other conferences had little power to stop them after the Big Two were given more power to reshape the playoff.
But one major shift of opinion in the SEC has apparently changed that narrative after it emerged the conference is thinking of moving away from the idea.
Then, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey himself remarked that he was against the idea of handing out what he called “allocations” based on conference membership.
That puts the SEC and its principal decision makers in line with the ACC and Big 12, who understandably were against the uneven auto bid proposal from the start.
The one outlier in supporting the automatic qualifiers appears to be the Big Ten, which is wary of letting go of those bids unless the SEC and ACC add a ninth conference football game to their schedules.
The Big Ten’s belief there is that those two leagues are getting away with artificially enhancing their win-loss records by avoiding that extra intra-conference game, while Big Ten teams play nine league opponents.
One reason why college football appears to be moving away from the idea is an effort to continue nationalizing the sport, and consolidating half of a prospective 16-team playoff in the hands of the South and Midwest would challenge that project.
“College football is an unbelievable, regional sport that became national right around the BCS,” Thamel said, which is to say, around the turn of the century.
“One of the challenges I’ve seen the sport have [is] trying to capture the I-95 sports fan, Boston, New York, Philly. You want to bring them in the same way you bring them in on the NCAA Tournament.
“You want to capture that casual fan, because you have the guy in Birmingham. You can’t get any more people to watch in Birmingham. And the idea of the 4-4-2-2-1-3, if you’re sitting in a bar in Southie, trying to talk about Notre Dame’s playoff chances, it’s just like your head would explode.”
The other option on the table is the so-called “5-11” format, which awards automatic places to five conference champions and 11 at-large bids chosen by the selection committee in a 16-team field.
“It’s not Good Will Hunting calculus, but it’s just not intuitive to a sports fan,” Thamel said of fans’ effort to plow through the playoff selection metrics.
“Basically, 5 plus 11 is like, we’re gonna take the conference champions and the rest of the best teams which, to me, is just a lot smoother if you’re trying to explain this.”
He added: “I just think, as this transitions to 5 and 11, which it appears on the trajectory to do so and probably for ‘26 but not certain, I just think for the sport in general, a clearer idea of where it’s going makes sense.”
—
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
