GRAPEVINE, Texas — On the fourth floor of the gargantuan Gaylord Texan Resort in this Dallas suburb, the conference commissioners spent three hours in the same room where the College Football Playoff selection committee members gather each December to decide the playoff field.
On the final day of three days of CFP meetings here this week, commissioners walked through a mock selection, getting a firsthand look at the data and process used by committee members — perhaps a last gasp from the CFP to show these decision-makers that the committee’s role should not be de-emphasized under any new playoff format.
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“There was a lot of new learning,” CFP executive director Rich Clark said. “They got to see the depth that committee members go to with the process. They also gave us some feedback to help us think through how we could improve the committee.”
From this week’s annual spring meetings, no decisions were made on the three most important questions of any future playoff format:
(1) How many teams are in the bracket?
(2) How are teams selected for the bracket?
(3) And how are teams seeded in the bracket?
While the answers remain incomplete, the pathway to those answers is becoming more clear.
(1) There continues to be a desire, from both the commissioners and television partner ESPN, to expand the bracket to at least 14 teams. (Is 16 still on the table? Yes.)
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(2) Leadership at the Big Ten and SEC, the leagues that hold decision-making power on format starting in 2026, continue to socialize a format that gives them more automatic qualifiers than any other conference — what’s become known as a “4-4-2-2-1” format granting four AQs to the top four finishers in both the SEC and Big Ten, two each to the ACC and Big 12, one to the Group of Six and one at-large in a 14-team model (to be…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/college-football/article/with-future-format-of-cfp-in-limbo-college-sports-brass-still-undecided-on-major-issues-134634138.html
Author : Ross Dellenger
Publish date : 2025-04-25 13:46:00
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