The Powers That Be that run the College Football Playoff will gather in suburban Dallas this week to continue shaping the sport's postseason format before the new contract begins in 2026, and on Monday ESPN's Heather Dinich posted a preview of what the FBS commissioners and Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua are expected to discuss. Dinich has been the most plugged-in reporter on all things CFP since the format was created more than a dozen years ago, and Monday's report, I can only assume, serves as a warning sign for the public and influential ADs to intervene before The Suits get in a room and mangle this thing six ways to Sunday.
Let's dive in.
Where things stand. The 2025 season is the last of the CFP's original 12-season contract.
Presently, the leading format for the next contract (2026-31) is the 4-4-2-2-1-1, a 14-team field in which the Big Ten and SEC would gobble up eight of 14 spots before the season begins. This isn't popular inside or outside of the room, but the Power 2 have negotiated themselves outside influence on the next CFP contract, a stark change from the we're-all-equal-here original deal.
What changes are being considered? There are a number of tweaks being considered, each one dumber than the last. Dinich writes:
One possibility, which could be viewed as a compromise, is having conferences earn automatic bids through their play each season....
Awarding more than one auto bid per conference is a failed plan, but let's at least hear them out.
A model in which each Power 4 league can earn guaranteed spots through a combination of its teams' overall records -- and maybe even TV ratings, according to a source -- could be presented. The highest-ranked conferences would earn the most automatic bids.
.... Are you kidding me? As we established during the college basketball season, each conference goes .500 against itself. So now we're awarding bids based off the tiny, uneven sample size of non-conference play? If UCLA loses to UNLV in September, that would hurt Michigan's Playoff chances in December? And LSU's CFP hopes could get a boost if more than 10 million people tune into Texas-Ohio State in Week 1? The CFP already deals with a crisis of confidence given that ESPN owns exclusive rights to the tournament, but you'd have legitimate conflict of interest complaints from the ACC, Big 12, American, etc., with the amount of SEC triple-headers ABC schedules throughout the season. And how is the Big 12 supposed to prove its superiority to the Power 2 given that it plays all of three games vs. the SEC and four against the B1G all season?
Let's continue.
There's also a belief that if teams earned their way to the playoff based on their league records, nonconference games would be less damaging to a team's overall résumé and playoff chances.
For example, if Ohio State went 9-3 during the regular season and -- gasp -- lost all three of its nonconference games, the Buckeyes could still be the Big Ten's top playoff team if they went undefeated in conference play and won the conference title game. This could encourage athletic directors to continue to schedule more blockbuster nonconference matchups without fear of early CFP elimination.
Already, the 12-team format has sparked discussion that by expanding the field, the Playoff has sucked meaning out of regular season games. This format would officially turn non-conference games into glorified scrimmages. There's a balance to non-conference scheduling -- you don't want to punish teams too harshly for losing, otherwise they won't play them at all -- but this moves too far in the other direction.
Why are the conferences so stubborn on multiple automatic bids? Why else? Money and control.
The 4-4-2-2-1 format is a tacit admission from the conferences that they've become too big to function cohesively. Last season's SEC regular season champion, Texas, did not play the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th or 7th place finisher in the league standings. Such an occurrence is bound to happen in a 16-team league where each team misses half of their conference-mates. As a remedy to that, the leagues want to continue holding championship games while also staging play-in tournaments, where its 3rd place finisher plays its 6th, and No. 4 plays No. 5. Each conference would, of course, own exclusive rights to these games and not have to split money with the rest of the sport.
In the Big Ten last season, 1st-place Oregon would have still played 2nd-place Penn State, while No. 3 Indiana would face No. 6 Iowa and No. 4 Ohio State would face No. 5 Illinois. None of those teams played in the regular season. In the SEC, No. 3 Tennessee vs. No. 6 Ole Miss and No. 4 Alabama vs. No. 5 LSU would've supplemented No. 1 Texas vs. No. 2 Georgia (two of those three would be rematches). The ACC has openly discussed giving its regular-season champion a bye while its second- and third-place finishers met in a play-in game.
In essence, this could turn a 14-team format into a 20-team tournament, where non-conference games are irrelevant and finishing sixth in your conference is all that's required to compete for a national championship.
What about this coming season? The 2024 format generated controversy by awarding first-round byes to Boise State (No. 9 in the committee's final rankings) and Arizona State (No. 12), which then forced No. 1 Oregon to face Ohio State in the quarterfinals. (You'd think this would be a warning about best-laid-plans by power conferences about what happens when you preemptively stack the deck in your favor, but apparently not.) The thought is to go to a straight-seeding format, a la the NCAA Tournament, but it's not so simple. Any change to 2025 requires unanimous approval, which means negotiations are afoot. No changes for 2025 are expected this week.
"The one thing that could come out of this meeting for this fall is the seeding versus ranking question," CFP executive director Rich Clark told ESPN. "But it doesn't have to come out of this meeting in April. We actually have a little more time to work through that one. So it may not, and if not, we're still expecting it hopefully this summer."