In the debate for the College Football Playoff's future, the tail is wagging the dog

We finally got an answer as to how and why the Big Ten came up with its cockamamie "4+4+2+2+1" proposal for the upcoming College Football Playoff format, to begin with the 2026 season. As reported by The Athletic's Scott Dochterman, the Big Ten has developed a healthy distrust that the selection committee will properly evaluate strength of schedules and instead get starry-eyed at the prospect of putting as many SEC teams in a 14- or 16-team field as the bracket will hold. This fear is not unfounded. 

In 2017, the committee put in an 11-1 Alabama team that didn't even win the SEC West over an 11-2 Big Ten champion Ohio State with three wins better than Alabama's best regular-season victory. (One of Ohio State's losses that season was at home to eventual Big 12 champion Oklahoma, the type of game all involved want to protect.) In 2018, 9-3 LSU and 9-3 Florida were selected for New Year's Six bowls over 9-3 Penn State, despite Penn State playing tougher non-conference games and owning more defensible losses than the Tigers and Gators. In 2024 and beyond, those aren't bowl trips up for grabs, they're playoff bids.

The Big Ten's data shows it would actually have gotten more teams in over the past four seasons with a 5+11 (auto-bids for only the five highest-ranked conference champions, at-larges for everyone else) model than the 4+ model, and yet that league prefers the objectivity of four guaranteed bids because, in its opinion, the Big Ten does not reap the rewards it should for playing nine conference games to the SEC and ACC's eight. 

And yet, the SEC is making the exact same complaint about the selection committee. The conference closed its annual spring meetings by distributing a PowerPoint deck that argued, in short, its eight games were more difficult than the Big Ten's nine and it was the SEC who has been victimized by the committee.

Greg Sankey has made not-so-veiled threats to burn the entire system down if an 11-1 Indiana gets in over a 9-3 Alabama again. "It's clear that not losing becomes in many ways more important than beating the University of Georgia, which two of our teams that were left out did," he said last week. Sankey was also reportedly bothered that Nebraska canceled a planned 2026-27 home-and-home with Tennessee and has encouraged his schools to continue pursuing those sorts of matchups, but that could change if he and the rest of the SEC believe that getting to 11-1 or 10-2 by any means necessary is a pre-requisite for competing for a national championship. 

The Big Ten is trying to apply all the pressure it can into the SEC adding a ninth conference game, something Sankey personally supports, but the league will only do so if it feels is advantageous toward CFP selection.

The SEC has not formally endorsed a playoff proposal, but the general feeling from those on the ground in Destin last week was that the SEC entered the week open to the 4+ model, but left it in favor of 5+11. (Lane Kiffin endorsed the 0+16 model, with no automatic bids for anyone.)

Where are the Big 12 and ACC in all this? Sensing the ground shifting beneath his feet, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark strongly campaigned for a 5+11 format last week. Yormark did so knowing that arrangement may ultimately cost his conference bids from year to year. "We want to earn it on the field, and that was the direction of the key stakeholder group — the ADs and the coaches — and I feel very comfortable with that. And I feel the same way, and I've been very outspoken about it," he said. 

ACC commissioner Jim Phillips declined to endorse a specific model when asked earlier last month.

Why is the Big 12 supporting a format that might cost itself bids in the long run? In short, the 4+ model is un-American. I mean that literally and figuratively. The only comparable model that reserves championship access for a fourth-place team is the Champions League of European soccer. The NFL guarantees bids for its eight division champions, but nothing to a second- or third-place finisher. Similarly, every other NCAA tournament reserves a bid for conference champions only. 

“The 5+11 might not be ideal for the conference, but it’s good for college football and it’s what’s fair,” he said.

Is the solution actually staring us in the face here? The Big Ten is campaigning to radically change the CFP format because of a mistrust in the committee's ability to properly evaluate the rigor of its schedule. The SEC is making not-so-veiled threats to radically change the way it builds its regular season schedule, for the exact same issue. The two superpowers are talking past each other, when the solution is clear:

You don't need to change the Playoff. You need to change how Playoff teams are evaluated and selected.

It's long been argued that the Tuesday night ranking shows do more harm than good to the committee's credibility. (You try explaining your personal Top 25, in a sport with as few data points as college football, in a logically consistent way from week to week and year to year.) The weekly rankings should have been eliminated by a full decade ago. The NCAA basketball committee releases periodic rankings throughout the season, which is a move that could be adopted if necessary. The NCAA also publishes its own metric (NET) by which the selection committee follows. College football leaders would be wise to consider something similar.

Before you come back with a rebuttal, I'm one step ahead of you. We tried that from 1998 to 2013, and people hated that, too.

A rebuttal to my own rebuttal: Frustration with the BCS was largely a square peg/round hole problem. There was simply no possible way to put more three or four deserving teams into a single championship game. The public is more accepting of computerized rankings in 2025 than it was in 1998, and especially so when used to break ties between 10-2 and 9-3 teams than the impossible task of selecting the No. 1 and No. 2-ranked teams in the nation. 

Of course, the devil lives fully within the details here. I'm personally skeptical of any arguments, all of which seemingly originate out of SEC country, where "best" seems to be code for "Let's just let recruiting rankings and hypothetical Vegas lines decide everything." The portal and NIL have leveled the playing field, evidenced by the Big Ten's back-to-back national championships and its 5-1 record vs. the SEC in the 2024-25 postseason. 

A BCS-like system wouldn't have to serve as a be-all, end-all, either. No one's suggesting we turn the keys of a billion-dollar enterprise governing dozens of multi-billion dollar universities over to a souped-up version of Google Sheets without a set of checks and balances. Commissioners should select a set of rankings to serve as a tiebreaker to a more robust set of instructions that is less open to interpretation of the various individuals cycling in and out of the Gaylord Texan boardroom. Give the selection committee a detailed blueprint of how to build the house, and make them stick to it. It's not perfect, but it's better than pre-awarding a spot in a championship tournament to your fourth-place team, or shying away from playing marquee games out of a misguided desire to get to 11-1, no matter how. 

When the College Football Playoff killed the BCS after the 2013 season, I never imagined arguing for dusting off its zombie-fied corpse a decade later. But, somehow, it seems more sane and less destructive to the fabric of college football than the alternatives.