College football’s principal decision makers held formal talks in Dallas on Tuesday to discuss the future of the sport’s playoff format, and while further expansion remains on the table, leaders have not decided on what the system will look like until they have more information.
Commissioners from the 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua, who together comprise the College Football Playoff Management Committee, are also considering a change in how teams are seeded in the playoff going forward.
“We laid the groundwork,” College Football Playoff executive director Rich Clark said.
“There’s still some things the committee wants from us, some research we need to do for them on their behalf so they can make good, informed decisions.”
He added: “They do want to make not just data-informed, but informed [decisions] … they don’t want to go into this on a whim. They want to make these decisions really strong.”
For now, the information gathering process begins in anticipation of the next College Football Playoff meeting, a virtual conference scheduled for March.
The proposal to change playoff seeding would have the Selection Committee reward the top four teams in the official rankings with the first-round bye instead of giving those places to the four highest-ranked conference champions as they did this past season.
Any change that comes to the College Football Playoff in 2025 will have to be passed by a unanimous vote, but that requirement goes away starting in 2026 and beyond.
And that’s when it’s expected the SEC and Big Ten will play an outsized role in what college football’s postseason looks like.
While rivals on the field, the two conferences emerged as the virtually unchallenged power brokers in the sport in the post-realignment era.
Leaders from those two conferences met privately in New Orleans earlier this week, where both leagues’ commissioners agreed they would prefer the “straight seeding” model going forward.
Neither the SEC or Big Ten commissioner spoke with reporters after Tuesday’s meeting, but ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said any decisions pertaining to the College Football Playoff for the 2025 season would have to be made with the format’s new contract starting in 2026 in mind.
Expansion also remains a major question for the format going forward, with proposals to enlarge the playoff to either 14 or 16 teams.
“All of it is open for us,” Phillips said. “It’s really important to get this thing right. Access is why we expanded from four to 12, and if we go to 14 or 16 or stay at 12, and I would say just that, none of those models were taken off.”
He added: “It’s important we make these decisions for ‘25 now, because they’re going to impact what happens in ‘26 and beyond.”
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