The SEC and Big Ten demanded the power to shape the CFP’s future. Now they can’t agree

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey often talks about the challenges of solving problems in large rooms of people, balancing many voices, viewpoints and priorities, as the root of college sports’ myriad issues.

It’s a fair point, and those rooms have shrunk in recent years in the hopes of finding better solutions more efficiently. The current College Football Playoff negotiations are a chance to prove Sankey’s theory correct.

Yes, the other FBS conferences contractually have the right to provide “meaningful input,” but the room where the next CFP format will be decided needs only two chairs — one for Sankey and one for his Big Ten counterpart, Tony Petitti.

The SEC and Big Ten were tired of operating in a structure that required consensus from all 11 CFP stakeholders. The new contract that kicks in next year gives the SEC and the Big Ten the power to do what they think is best. Yet, still, the CFP talks have hit a bump, stemming directly from the SEC’s interminable internal debate over whether to continue to play eight conference games or move to nine, which would match the number played by the Big Ten.

After the SEC spent last week making headlines and pounding its chest at its annual spring meetings, decision-makers in the Big Ten were left wondering whether the two leagues can agree on a model for determining college football’s champion.

“We thought we were on the same page. What was that?” one incredulous Big Ten athletic director, granted anonymity to candidly address the state of discussions, told The Athletic late last week.

The Big Ten’s preference is clear and has been for a while: The CFP field should be primarily made up of automatic qualifiers (AQs) determined by conference standings and play-in games. Whether that field includes 14 teams or 16 — the new front-runner — doesn’t seem to matter that much.

Administrators in Big Ten country believed the SEC was on board. Twice in the last nine months, Big Ten and SEC leaders held joint meetings. Sankey and Petitti, by all accounts, have a good relationship. They’re supposed to be “on the same page,” leading college sports from their perches atop it.

Not so fast. SEC athletic directors and coaches left Destin, Fla., intrigued with a different plan. Instead of AQs, what if five conference champions and 11 at-large selections populated a 16-team bracket? The plan was developed by the Big 12 as a way to appeal to the SEC’s ego.

“(SEC coaches) talked about — I’ll call it a 5-11 model — and our own ability to earn those berths,” Sankey said last week during one of four briefings with reporters. “The question is, why wouldn’t that be fine? Why wouldn’t we do that?”

“I kinda like the 5-11 model, if we can fix the selection process,” an SEC athletic director said as the meetings wound down.

It is important to stress that everything being debated about the size and scope of the CFP can be summed up thusly: The Big Ten and SEC do not trust the selection committee process.

It’s nothing personal. Many current athletic directors in both conferences have served on the 13-member committee. Michigan AD Warde Manuel was its chair last year for the first 12-team Playoff.

But just one season’s worth of 12-team data was enough to convince many that the committee did not properly account for the varying degrees of difficulty college football teams face within their schedules.

“The strength of our conference and how that’s evaluated is really something we want to be a priority. I think that’s important for us,” Sankey said last Thursday as the SEC closed its meetings by distributing six pages of charts, graphs and metrics detailing its awesomeness.

“The extent we can have clarity, maybe that can keep us advancing. Maybe if we lack clarity, maybe that causes us to take a step back in our decision-making.”

Make no mistake, the Big Ten has similar concerns. Petitti would like to turn the selection committee into a seeding committee and use a model that guarantees his league and the SEC four CFP bids each.

But the SEC’s public proclamation of its power was a bit much for the Big Ten, which chooses to work in silence and cede the floor to its rival at this time of year.

Still, if the SEC wants to consider a CFP model dominated by at-large selections, Big Ten leaders appear open-minded. On one condition: Time to play nine conference games, SEC.

And there’s the rub.

An AQ-centric CFP model provides the protection that SEC athletic directors feel would make it worthwhile to add another potentially difficult game to their already rigorous schedules.

With a CFP field made up of mostly at-large bids, sprinkling nine extra losses across the conference becomes less appealing, especially after the selection committee seemed overly focused, according to the SEC, on the number of losses when ranking teams last year.

To which folks in the Big Ten respond: Yes, welcome to our world. The Big Ten has been playing a nine-game conference schedule for nine years.

If the SEC wants to talk 5-11 with the Big Ten, the conversation needs to start with a commitment to playing nine conference games.

That seems to be a reasonable request.

Then the two leagues can tackle the selection process and come up with metrics and protocols to guide committee members and make their choices less subjective.

That’s not an easy task, but let’s be real: A 16-team field last year would have included six SEC teams, along with the four Big Ten teams that made it into the 12-teamer. Expanding the bracket alone should regularly get those conferences more than enough bids.

Without multiple AQs, Petitti’s vision of a reimagined championship weekend with high-stakes play-in games takes a serious hit. But taking them off the table doesn’t have to bring negotiations back to square one.

The Big Ten might be disappointed to backtrack from AQs, but implementing a 16-team model with a restructured selection process seems better than sticking with the status quo, which two Big Ten ADs suggested would be the fallback if the SEC and Big Ten can’t agree on a new format. Even Sankey acknowledged that is a possible — however unlikely — scenario.

The AQ debate has not been particularly well received by those outside the footprint of those two conferences, including general college football fans. The SEC and Sankey have publicly positioned themselves as potential saviors, pulling Petitti and the Big Ten away from an unpopular idea.

Now the Big Ten can turn it back on the SEC. Just play nine conference games, guys.

The next meeting of the full 11-member CFP management committee is scheduled for mid-June. The Power 4 commissioners speak routinely among themselves and held their latest call earlier this week, with rethinking the selection process at the heart of the conversation. They all can stake a claim to feeling, at times, that it hasn’t worked in their favor. See: unbeaten Florida State in 2023 when the ACC got left out.

More importantly, though, Sankey and Petitti need to connect and sort out where things stand with their constituents.

Both seem to understand that after emphasizing the need for their leagues to have more power, autonomy and alignment, failing to agree on the one item they truly can control would be, frankly, a little embarrassing.

The room is all yours, gentlemen. Time to figure it out.

(Photo: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)

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