The new College Football Playoff is here. Are more changes coming in the near future?

Mike Aresco is fresh off a three-week vacation to London and Scotland — a voyage he’s wanted to make for years now available to him in his first few months fully retired.

He and his wife visited Buckingham Palace. They toured some of the most renowned Scottish scotch distilleries. And they played golf at the world’s most spectacular oceanside courses.

But just a few months ago, Aresco, then the commissioner of the American Athletic Conference, found himself in the midst of heated negotiations over the future of the College Football Playoff. He prides himself in helping the Group of Five earn automatic access in the expanded postseason.

But this week, from his retirement home in Idaho, he wonders for how long that will last.

“Down the road, I do think it might be a concern,” he said, “especially if our G5 teams do not do well enough and aren’t ranked high enough.”

Days away from kickoff of, perhaps, the most anticipated season in college football history, excitement brews over the possibilities created by an overhauled and expanded playoff — a four-round, 12-team format with five automatic qualifiers, seven at-large selections and a football version of the First Four played at on-campus stadiums.

And yet, even before a single round is complete in the expanded postseason, there is a sharp eye on what the future holds.

Will the Group of Five maintain its one automatic qualifying spot?

Will leagues such as the SEC and Big Ten eventually get multiple automatic berths in the field?

In this time of historic transformation in college sports, there is but one certainty: “Change is inevitable,” Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian said recently, an appropriate summation of these times.

That includes changes to college football’s postseason.

In fact, all of this change, and potential change, has led to an in-person…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-08-15 12:30:10

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