Big Ten luring SEC toward new College Football Playoff format

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey speaks on the court after the Gators won the national title

The Gators defeated Houston 65-63 Monday night at the Alamodome in San Antonio to win the program’s third national championship.

MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — The Big Ten’s preferred playoff model is a trojan horse for the SEC.

And still, the SEC keeps inching toward the horse’s belly.

If the Big Ten gets its way, the College Football Playoff would move in 2026 toward a format in which more bids are awarded via automatic selection.

The idea works like this: In a 16-team field, the Big Ten and SEC would get four automatic bids apiece, the ACC and Big 12 would get two auto bids apiece, the Group of Five would get one auto bid, and that leaves three at-large bids up for grabs. In many years, Notre Dame would snag one of the three at-large bids.

It’s easy to understand why the ACC and Big 12 dislike this model. It preassigns twice as many automatic bids to the Big Ten and SEC before the season even kicks off. It’s a model based more on conference brand prestige than in-season meritocracy.

What’s more difficult to comprehend is the SEC’s swelling support for this model.

On the surface, the auto-bid model sounds OK for the SEC.

Upon deeper consideration, though, a better model for the SEC’s quest to stockpile bids would be a 16-team model that assigns all bids via at-large selection. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey seems to understand this, but will his conference’s membership resist the auto-bid plan?

“For all the gripes about us having four (automatic bids), go back and look at the previous 11 years … we actually lose more spots under that (auto-bid) model than anybody else,” Sankey said Monday before his conference’s spring meetings.

Bingo. There’s plenty of reason for the SEC to be wary of this auto-bid model.

The SEC considers…

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Publish date : 2025-05-27 10:05:00

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