A fractured SEC looking for consensus on CFP expansion as Big Ten draws clear line at 24-team model

A CBS Sports survey shows SEC coaches and athletic directors are split on College Football Playoff expansion while the other three Power Four conferences are in lock-step on a 24-team model

Greg Sankey arrives in Destin next week with the future of the College Football Playoff in his hands and his own conference split on what to do with it.

The Big Ten drew its line in the sand this week at its spring meetings by re-upping its pledge to move from 12 teams to a 24-team field. The ACC and Big 12 are on board, as long as the economics make sense. 

That leaves the SEC as the lone conference still trying to find its voice -- and its final decision could change the sport forever.

SEC administrators and coaches descend next week on the white, sandy beaches in the Florida panhandle for a three-day marathon of spring meetings led by Sankey, their commissioner, who still openly supports an expansion to 16 teams in the playoff.  

But not everyone within the SEC's ranks is on board, and the pressure inside the meeting rooms may be greater than the pressure Sankey faces from external forces. The commissioner acknowledged as much this week.

"What you will hear next week is a lot of our coaches, a lot of our athletic directors, and probably some others, think 24 is the right direction," he said Tuesday on The Paul Finebaum Show. "What we've said is that could ultimately be the proper direction. We just don't think you leap to that without information. And research and understanding the marketplace informs that decision."

The information is coming. The CFP discussion on the SEC agenda this year will be, in Sankey's words, "the most in-depth session on the CFP we've ever had," doubling the one hour spent on the topic at last year's meetings.

"A lot of information will be brought into that conversation," he said.

As Sankey said, the SEC is a mess of opinions on the CFP.

Coaches, athletic directors split

A CBS Sports survey of SEC head coaches and athletic directors -- conducted on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue ahead of Destin -- reveals a conference that does not speak with one voice on the future of the playoff. Some support the 16-team position Sankey has publicly defended for more than a year. Others want the 24-team model the Big Ten is pushing. Another group advocates for a middle path that starts at 16 and expands to 24 within a few seasons. 

And so is uncertainty.

Among athletic directors who took a position, at least three support a 24-team field. At least three more said they would start at 16 and expand to 24, a compromise the Big Ten and SEC discussed last year but opted not to pursue. 

One AD said they preferred 16 but were open to 24 if the economics worked. Three said they preferred 16 with no commitment to further expansion. One said they were unsure but supported expansion in some form. 

Among head coaches who took a position, at least three supported 24. Two said they would support either 16 or 24. Two said they preferred 16 but would accept 24 under certain scheduling conditions. Two said they preferred 16. One said they were indifferent. Two were undecided. 

The fault line does not run cleanly along program prestige, geography or competitive pedigree. In multiple cases, an athletic director and that school's head coach are not in alignment, with one favoring 24 and the other favoring 16.

The SEC has been here before. The 2022 vote to move from four to 12 teams required a supermajority, not unanimity, from the conference's leaders. Sankey, on Tuesday, made clear he was not arriving in Destin with a verdict in hand.

"I don't sit in the meetings and say we're doing this and that's the way it works," he said.

Several SEC ADs volunteered the idea of revisiting the briefly discussed compromise offered by the Big Ten last year to expand to 16 teams, with the commitment to move to 24 within two to three years. The issue is what to do with conference championship games, which would dissolve with a 24-team format but would likely remain if the field expands to 16.

"I think the way it's structured now, you'll create a short-term financial problem," Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said Tuesday at the conference's spring meetings at the Terranea Resort, in a session that ran nearly an hour. "Maybe someone can convince us, well, we'll play a championship game for two more years at 16 and then go.

"I mean, look, I would say we are not a group that won't consider options. We don't behave that way. We listen."

The power conferences figure to lose more than $200 million combined with the elimination of championship games, which, in theory, would be recouped by creating 12 additional games in a 24-team CFP. Big Ten ADs told CBS Sports this week they were not provided a new financial model for an expanded playoff without championship games.

Moving to 16 without a commitment to move to 24 in the near future, however, is off the table. 

"We've had zero conversation about 16," the Big Ten commissioner said. "Plan B is what we have now, what we negotiated ... we would stay with what we have."

The latest 24-team format proposed includes only one automatic qualifier spot reserved for the highest-ranked Group of Six champion. The remaining 23 teams would be seeded based on the Selection Committee's rankings, a point of contention among SEC schools since last spring, when the conference demanded tweaks to the committee's strength-of-schedule metrics.

Remember, the Big Ten and SEC hold the power to change the CFP format. They must consider the opinions of the other FBS conferences and Notre Dame, but the final decision is theirs to make. If they can not agree on a format, the CFP remains at 12 teams for the foreseeable future.

Outside the SEC, the rest of the sport is not waiting.

The American Football Coaches Association formally recommended the maximum expansion of the playoff field earlier this month, along with the elimination of conference championship games and a tighter postseason calendar. The ACC's coaches and athletic directors voiced support for a 24-team field at their spring meetings on May 13, and commissioner Jim Phillips publicly endorsed the model the following day. Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark told CBS Sports the same week that his league supported a 24-team field, subject to working through the economics.

The television factor 

The television partners are split. Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks endorsed 24 teams at the Sports Business Journal's World Congress of Sports in Los Angeles in April, framing the expanded field as a fix for both the early-season and late-season schedule. FOX is the Big Ten's primary broadcast partner.

"If you don't get penalized for playing those big nonconference games early and there's a bigger pool of teams that can get into a 24-team playoff, the schedule gets better in September," Shanks said. "And then in November, you have more meaningful games because a lot more teams are in play to be able to get in."

ESPN, which holds the CFP's media rights and is the SEC's only TV partner, has signaled a different appetite. The network prefers no more than 16 teams, Phillips revealed last week. Anything bigger than a 14-team playoff triggers a clause in ESPN's six-year, $7.8 billion contract, allowing the CFP to be taken to market for other broadcasters to potentially outbid ESPN, a complication that has loomed over every expansion conversation. The contract runs through the 2031-32 season.

Petitti's case for 24 has been built on access, calendar and the Big Ten's investment in football. Going to 24 clears the first weekend of December of conference championship games, opening room for the playoff to begin three weeks earlier than previous years. The national champion would be crowned no later than the second Monday of January.

Petitti's case for 24 traces directly to his previous job. Before he ran the Big Ten, he spent more than a decade at Major League Baseball, where he helped design the expansion of the playoff field and the move to the three-game Wild Card series.

"When I was at baseball, we never had to convince anybody that keeping more teams in the race is better for everybody and the fans," he said. "We never had to do that. And I feel like in this space, like, we're kind of being asked to do that. It's almost like, to me, almost counterintuitive."

The test he used to run at MLB measured how many teams were within striking distance of a playoff spot on Sept. 1, what local ratings looked like, and September attendance. 

"There's a big difference between being 10 games out of a spot or being four games out of a spot," he said. The college football version, he argued, would put a Minnesota-Iowa game in November on the same map. "I don't get why we can't have a Minnesota-Iowa game have real impact every so often," he said. "Every year, actually. Why can't we do that?"

The SEC's coaches, Sankey has said, have prioritized two open weeks for recovery before the playoff begins, which is at odds with the Big Ten's proposed calendar. But that is the coaches' argument about scheduling, not an institutional argument against 24, and the survey suggests the coaches' room is not unified on the underlying format.

 The clock is the thing now. A decision on the 2027 CFP format is due Dec. 1, written into ESPN's contract with the playoff.

"The decision phase ought not to linger until late into the football season," Sankey said.

The Big Ten has already moved. Petitti's ultimatum sits on the table. Now, the SEC has six months to answer it.

And the answer, increasingly, may depend less on what the SEC thinks of the Big Ten than on what the SEC thinks of itself.