The SEC helped to reposition meeting coordination to hit the 12-team playoff vision. Now it’s time for SEC boss Greg Sankey to round up what he’s collapsed. Innovation for conference champions helps the SEC and the Big Ten, but other conferences can throw short-term road blocks. The same goes for the 2025 season, despite Sec’s hunger for change.
Greg Sankey enjoys philosophical meditation. I wonder if the SEC Commissioner knows this.
Or how about this? Homemade problems are the most difficult to solve.
Sankey wants to restructure the 12-team college football playoffs he helped create after just one season.
Sankey’s revised wish list includes removing first-round playoff-by protection for conference champions.
In such a universe, the first round goodbye was not built-in protection for the conference champion. In theory, all four goodbyes could go to the same meeting team. For example, Sankey’s Sec.
Sankey says the change was necessary as the conference partnerships were not visible when commissioners, including Sankey, came up with a 12-team playoff format.
Hmm, why did the meeting arrangements change?
Ah, yes, that changed after Sankey piloted the SEC looting in Texas and Oklahoma. The SEC robbery began an ignition of the reorganization carousel, with the Big Ten getting caught up in action and raiding the West Coast. Next, the Big 12 and ACC bought discount racks for the Pac-12. The meeting became unrecognizable shell.
“It’s not the same reality that existed when the 12-team model was developed. I gave my opinion on what I think is a need to adjust,” Sankey said last week on the “Paul Feinbaum Show.”
“And the issue of seed, especially moving the team to the top four, needs to be deeply considered.”
Don’t forget, Sankey has already designed a 12-team playoff change before its release. Originally, the playoffs were devised with six automatic bids and six large bids. After the PAC-12 was buckled, Sankey successfully led the switch to five automatic bids and seven large berths.
However, his latest efforts to bend the bracket to suit the desires of the SEC encounter obstacles.
Changes to the playoffs before next season require unanimous approval from other conference members and Notre Dame. Sankey knows that he rarely gets the full support he needs to cause change. League commissioners like The Big 12, Mountain West and the ACC have little incentive to give up goodbye for the conference champions.
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Big 12, the ACC has little reason to redo the college football playoffs
Goodbye to the first round is more valuable than bracket positioning. It also causes additional financial rewards to the league, represented in the quarter-finals.
Meeting commissioners are not a business of turning down paydays.
“There’s no desire to give up on the financial rewards that come with goodbye,” said Chairman Brett Yomark on Yahoo! He spoke to. Sports.
As ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips told Yahoo!, conference champion sport Hiamaki “is not an exotic structure.”
Certainly, professional leagues may call that common sense.
Once the At-Large Playoff qualifies for goodbye, college football will become America’s only sport, with teams in fourth place in meeting place and winning a playoff bye.
The commissioners reportedly meet later this month in Dallas to discuss the future of the playoffs. If even one rival conference member told Sankey, “Thank you, Bacco. We like the playoffs,” the format will remain the same as next season.
In other words, grab the straw, seconds.
You too, Big Ten.
These “Super 2” meetings bulged during the reorganization by weakening other meetings, but now they grab a straw and delve into what they fell apart for another year.
The SEC, the Big Ten will get their way, but how quickly is the question?
Stifling “Super 2” with playoff revisions would be a short-lived roadblock to the playoffs. Starting with the 2026 season, unanimous commissioner approval is no longer needed to change the format. At the time, the SEC and the Big Ten gained additional authority on the bracket. It’s hard to imagine that it’s good for a “little man” meeting.
So, there’s a very high chance that changes will occur, so why are rival commissioner capitalates needed for Sankey’s Big Ten cohorts, Sankey and Tony Pettitty?
If the team was seeded based on this past season, the Big Ten and SEC teams would have seized all the Byes.
I don’t blame the SEC for snapping Texas and Oklahoma and causing a reorganization. Sankey is working to find a path to more Vis for the SEC team. The meeting was able to use boost as the SEC endured two consecutive seasons without moving the team into the National Championship Game. But the Big 12, ACC, etc. have no reason to fork it.
Yomark and Phillips were at work telling Sankey to spend the next year digging into the beautiful 12-team playoff vision that helped them crumble into the reorganized soup.
Blake Toppmeyer is a National College Football columnist for the USA Today Network. btopppmeyer email him at @gannett.com and follow him at X @btopppmeyer. Subscribe to read all his columns.