Little Headway Made in CFP Expansion, “Didn’t even get close…”
If you thought that the talk and buzz around the college football landscape was over after Georgia’s victory over Alabama on Monday night, boy, do we have news for you.
That very same weekend, the College Football Playoff committee, composed of the 10 FBS athletic commissioners and Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick, holed themselves up in a ballroom in Indianapolis and began discussing what would need to take place for an expansion of the CFP to occur once more.
This time, though, there was a key difference. Each year before the big game, the university presidents and chancellors meet behind closed doors to discuss the future of the sport, but this past year was the first year that fans thought that there might be something concrete - that maybe, just maybe, something could come out of these meetings that hadn’t before. Those fans were just that, though - hopeful, and it didn’t go as they probably hoped.
After eight long months of discussion since the 12-team proposal was made public in June, the committees came away with no set plan that can be put into place soon. The committee did, however, manage to slide something across the desk.
Mississippi State University president Mark Keenum is the chair of the CFP board of managers, and he said today that the committee of commissioners officially proposed a 12-team model, but they did not take a vote. Despite that fact, Keenum still seemed upbeat about the proposal.
”I think that we’re going to get there,” Keenum said to reporters, “I think that there is a commitment on the part of our commissioners that we’re going to move forward to come up with an expansion for college football.”
Keenum also mentioned that the committee knows they’re running short on time, stating they want to get a deal done “as quickly as we can.”
Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby left the meetings in a much less hopeful tone than Keenum, stating the committee “didn’t even get close to unanimity.”
“There’s holdouts for four, there’s holdouts for eight, there’s holdouts for 12. It’s been a frustrating process,” said Bowlsby.
So, where is the contingency, some might ask? It’s simple - Automatic qualifications. The SEC in particular isn’t for it, and why would they be? There are at least two teams in the SEC each season that can easily make a case for the Playoff, and more automatic bids for other conference champions just means less spots will be available for the SEC. Notre Dame isn’t too keen on the idea of lots of auto-bids either, considering you have to win a conference to get one in all of the currently proposed models.
“Then why can’t it just be the 12 best teams?”, some have asked, but that won’t work for the rest of the country, according to the other conference commissioners. The SEC would still dominate the Playoff, as they would have 3-4 teams selected each year, and that’s exactly what they’re trying to avoid.
All in all, the committees still seem gridlocked. Yes, there’s a motion, maybe even some kind of plan in place, but it's apparent not everyone really likes it, and that a few might just still hate it. That’s all to be determined, though, as the committees look to reconvene in the future. There really is no rest for the weary.
