What is good?
That's a favorite question when it is predetermined that – anything – is deemed good and accepted as truth.
What is good to me might not be for you – and that's how every college football argument starts. So, here we are – less than a week after the College Football Playoff announced a good decision to modify seeding for 2025-26. At the SEC meetings on Monday, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey fired back at the reactionary statements from ACC commissioner Jim Phillips and Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark.
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"I don't need lectures from others about the good of the game," Sankey said. "I don't lecture others about the good of the game and coordinate press releases about the good of the game. You can issue your press statement, but I'm actually looking for ideas to move us forward."
Two proposals need to be eliminated before the College Football Playoff expands to 16 teams. The 4-4-2-2-1-3 automatic qualifier model for the 16-team playoff is bad. Play-in games in the 16-team CFP are worse. The concept of play-in games on conference championship weekend to determine automatic qualifiers is the worst idea of all.
The SEC and the Big Ten have combined to win nine of the 11 national titles in the CFP era. Do those conferences need to be guaranteed half the playoff field when they probably will get that anyway?
Not good at all.
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The 4-4-2-2-1-3 proposal is terrible
"4-4-2-2-1-3." Is that a zip code? A phone number? When you Google it, a calculator comes up. It is confusing. This is a failure in waiting.
According to ESPN, Sankey said the 4-4-2-2-1-3 has not been decided as the format for the potential CFP expansion to 16 teams after the 2025-26 season. It's being discussed, as a college football compromise of sorts.
"There is a lot attributed to me that is not at this moment attributable to me," Sankey said. "We're not committed to any particular format. I have over the time talked about, let's just have the 'fill in the blank' number best teams. That goes back to 2019-20 playoff expansion. I've reiterated that. Our room has interest in different models."
Is the 4-4-2-2-1-3 model one of those models? How would it work? The CFP would expand to 16 teams. The SEC and Big Ten get four automatic berths apiece. The ACC and Big 12 – the other two Power 4 conferences – get two bids apiece. The Group of 5 gets one, and there are three at-large bids – one spot which Notre Dame would be eligible for.
So, we're turning college football into the Electoral College, with the Big Ten and the SEC playing the role of California and Florida. It is a stupid move. The SEC and Big Ten are going to get more than half of the spots in the College Football Playoff organically. Why mandate it at the expense of the ACC and Big 12?
It's useless to go off CFP rankings data from 2014-23 to prove this point. Oklahoma and Texas were in the Big 12, and USC and UCLA were in the Pac-12 then. All we have is the final 2024 CFP rankings. Four Big Ten teams (Oregon, Penn State, Ohio State, Indiana) made the CFP. Three SEC teams (Georgia, Texas, Tennessee) made the CFP – and three more (Alabama, Ole Miss, South Carolina) would have been in with a 16-team model. That's 62.5% of the field.
It should be OK that in any given year the Big Ten or SEC might get just three CFP teams.
Apparently it's not to the SEC. Sankey leaned on the strength-of-schedule argument when it comes to the CFP's future with the concern being the cancellation of non-conference games.
"It's clear that not losing becomes in many ways more important than beating the University of Georgia, which two of our teams who were left out did. Nobody had that kind of quality win," Sankey said.
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Sankey is right about that. The committee does value wins and losses more than strength of schedule at this point. Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer echoed that sentiment Tuesday.
"You wonder what would have happened if other people would have played our schedule," he said.
That's a direct shot at No. 10 SMU – the last at-large team in the CFP last season. The Mustangs were ranked one spot ahead of the Crimson Tide, which finished 9-3 in the regular season. This is part of the reason why the "4-4-2-2-1-3" model talk exists, and it's bad. Like ruined-the-first-weekend-of-the-playoff bad.
Yet it's not enough to change the model away from straight seeding. It's not the only bad idea either.
Why the 'play-in concept' is even worse
Another concept that is being explored is the notion of a play-in game both at the conference and College Football Playoff level.
"I think the word 'hope' is at the center, too," Sankey said. "How do you bring people into the conversation late in the season in a changing environment, and so the idea of, 'Could you have play-in-type games?' continues to populate itself before you're in the CFP selection. That's about building interest and giving hope."
I hope none of this happens.
At the CFP level, that would mean a series of play-in games before the first round of the CFP starts. So potentially seeds 9-16 would play before the first round of the tournament, and the top four seeds (1-4) would get double byes. Forget about diluting the regular season. At that point, you're diluting the CFP.
At the conference level, there is talk of potential play-in games for those automatic spots outside of the traditional conference championship games. Imagine the loser of the Auburn-Alabama or Ohio State-Michigan game falling to a consolation 3-6 for a playoff spot.
Who doesn't want to see that? The answer might be a lot more fans than you think. Yes, it's a solution for eliminating conference championship games, but it also creates more confusion. Last year in the SEC, Texas finished 7-1 in conference play and Georgia and Tennessee finished 6-2. Six schools finished 5-3. Which tiebreakers would be used to determine who plays in those play-in games? It's too much tie-breaker math.
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A simple 16-team College Football Playoff expansion, please
Sankey had a point about that 4-4-2-2-1-3 model that made sense.
"If you go back and do the research, that kind of format could cost us positions depending on the number of teams," Sankey said.
Go back to the first year of the College Football Playoff in 2014 – when we had a Power 5. No. 1 Alabama (12-1), No. 7 Mississippi State (10-2) and No. 9 Ole Miss (9-3) would have been in, and No. 16 Missouri (10-3) would be bumped out if the highest ranked Group of 5 school – No. 20 Boise State (11-2) – was let in. The SEC had only two teams – No. 2 Alabama (12-1) and No. 12 Ole Miss (9-3) – in the top 16 in 2015. Did they deserve four automatic berths in those seasons?
Of course not. So, why entertain it? Sankey should be leading the charge for a simplified CFP expansion that would protect what's left of the traditional regular season while amplifying college football's best trump card for the future.
The SEC does have the best regular season as far as competitive depth. A total of 10 SEC teams are in our Post-Spring Top 25. Is parity a good thing? Sankey recalled his response last year when No. 2 Georgia traveled to No. 4 Alabama on Sept. 28 when reporters said that matchup “didn't feel the same” in the new 12-team CFP era.
"For those of you there, I think that was a pretty incredible night," Sankey said. "I think everybody competed at the highest level as hard as they could. We had that over and over."
Alabama lost three games after that night. Would they have beaten SMU? Yes. Did they earn the right to play in the CFP in its current state? No. That is the crux behind these new proposals, and no matter the justifications it's not good for the game unless you go to a straight two-conference Super League model with the SEC and Big Ten.
What is the best solution? The top 16 teams in the final College Football Playoff rankings go to the playoff at the end of the regular season. No automatic qualifiers. No conference championships. No first-round byes. No BS. That national champion will play a max of 15 games in that format. The SEC and Big Ten might combine for 12 playoff teams one year and six the next. More often than not – they would have between eight and 10 teams. That accounts for variables from season-to-season – and in that setup it works. By Tuesday, the 5-11 model – five highest-ranked conference champions and 11 at-large teams – was gaining steam. That's close enough.
Is that good?
No, it's not.
It's great for the game moving forward.