44 Days Until Kansas Football: Looking Ahead to the new College Football Playoff
This offseason has been full of big news and unexpected developments. USC and UCLA moving to the Big Ten has taken up a lot of the attention of the nation. In fact, people are so preoccupied with the realignment shenanigans, that they quickly lost interest in the SEC Media Days when we didn't get a repeat of the earth-shattering news that broke last season.
With realignment on the brain, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey just had to indicate that the SEC has no further expansion plans at this time to get the national media to pretty much turn away. It probably doesn't hurt that Pac 12 reporters are so readily going on their conference sunshine pumping tour.
But earlier this week, Sankey made a statement that should worry fans of the Big 12 (and honestly anyone not in the Big Ten or SEC).
That quote should be terrifying, given the current bias of the national media (aka ESPN) for the SEC. If an expanded playoff did not have any automatic qualifiers, then there is a good chance that the SEC would receive three or four spots every single year in an expanded format, especially after Oklahoma and Texas join the league. Add in another three or four spots for the Big Ten, and suddenly the College Football Playoff would end up being the two conference invitational that lots of people are worried about as the eventual future of the sport.
So what's the solution? What is going to be the most effective way to prevent something like this from happening? I see two potential options for the Big 12.
Strengthen the Big 12 as much as possible
Option 1 is to do absolutely everything possible to make the Big 12 as strong as possible, in order to force serious consideration of the top few teams for inclusion in the playoffs. This would likely include further expansion by taking teams from the Pac 12.
The downside to this approach is that it does nothing to limit the number of spots that the SEC and Big Ten get. In a 12 team model, it's likely that the Big 12 would get at most two spots, with the Big Ten and SEC each getting four or five, leaving one more spot for the Pac 12/ACC/Group of 5 teams. That will only serve to increase the gap between the top and bottom.
Preserve as many conferences as possible
This might seem counterintuitive, but there is an argument to be made that the best bet is not to consolidate power into your conference, but instead make sure there are as many viable conferences as possible.
More conferences mean that there are more votes in how the next playoff structure is set up. And despite the worries that the Big Ten and SEC will just break away to form their own playoff, I don't think it is realistic to think that they would forfeit the rest of the benefits of being part of the NCAA, at least not until those conferences decide to expand much further than they already have.
Ultimately, I don't think there is a good answer to definitely close the gap between the Big Ten/SEC and the rest of the NCAA. But the silver lining is that those two conferences seem content to hold tight for a while. The remaining conferences need to decide what their best option would be to keep the gap from growing too large, and that would include making sure that the next playoff structure guarantees as much access as possible.
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