A 12-team College Football Playoff is right for the sport — and would be good for UK
By this point, the problem with the four-team College Football Playoff structure should be self-evident.
Since the CFP commenced with the 2014 season (2014-15 school year), there have been 32 playoff slots available — and four schools have combined to occupy 21 of them.
Alabama (seven appearances), Clemson (six), Ohio State and Oklahoma (four each) have been playoff perennials. Add Georgia and Notre Dame (two playoff appearances each), and six schools have claimed 25 of the 32-playoff spots available.
Even with two new playoff entrants, Cincinnati and Michigan, making it this year, only 13 out of the 130 teams that comprise the Football Bowl Subdivision have participated in the four-team CFP over eight seasons.
By comparison, 24 different schools have filled the last 32 slots in the men’s basketball NCAA Tournament Final Four. No school has appeared more than twice in the men’s hoops national semifinals over the past eight tourneys.
Simply put, the CFP needs to be expanded to provide access to the championship tournament to more players, more teams, more schools, more fans, more communities and more states.
That is why it is beyond distressing that the push to expand to a 12-team CFP beginning with the 2024 season seems on the verge of being torpedoed by mistrust and pettiness at the highest levels of college sports.
As with so many contentious issues presently in major-college athletics, the divisions threatening the expanded playoff seem to lead back to the pending move by Oklahoma and Texas to the Southeastern Conference.
If you recall, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey was part of a four-person working group with Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby, Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson and Notre Dame Athletics Director Jack Swarbrick that in June proposed a 12-team playoff.
That plan called for the six highest-ranked league champions plus six at-large teams to fill the field.
The following month, word broke that Texas and Oklahoma had been in secret talks with the SEC and were leaving the Big 12 to join the Southeastern Conference.
That thunderbolt rocked college sports. It led to understandable concerns from leagues other than the SEC that Sankey and ESPN — the Southeastern Conference’s primary television partner and the broadcaster of the CFP under current TV contracts — were working to expand the playoff based on knowledge no one else involved in the process shared.
In response, the ACC, the Big Ten and the Pac-12 formed “The Alliance,” a loosely defined confederation among the three leagues widely seen as an intended counter to the SEC’s growing might.
Subsequently, it is members of “The Alliance” who appear to be throwing up road blocks to the 12-team playoff proposal that Sankey helped create.
The ACC now reportedly favors an eight-team playoff.
Rather than the six highest-ranked league champions earning automatic playoff bids, the Big Ten wants playoff guarantees for all power-conference champions regardless of ranking plus only the one highest-rated champ from the other FBS leagues.
The Pac-12, for its part, says it is open to an eight- or 12-team playoff, and one with or without automatic qualifiers.
New Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff has also suggested waiting until after the current TV contract with ESPN expires after the 2025 season and the power conferences then imposing their own playoff format.
Meanwhile, all the other FBS leagues plus Notre Dame apparently remain in support of the 12-team proposal put forward in June.
This matters because, to adopt a new playoff format while the current contracts are in effect, support must be unanimous.
In seemingly attempting to spite the SEC, “The Alliance” looks to be administering self-inflicted wounds.
The Pac-12 hasn’t gotten a team in the four-team CFP since Washington after the 2016 season.
Other than Clemson, the ACC has filled one (Florida State after the 2014 campaign) playoff slot ever.
Many years in a 12-team field, the Big Ten would seem likely to land multiple playoff berths.
Meanwhile, the SEC — which has never missed the CFP and has had two of the four teams in the field twice (after 2017 and this year) — has no reason to fear the status quo.
Strictly from a provincial interest, a 12-team format might actually give Kentucky — and its fans — a chance to experience the College Football Playoff.
Both in 2018 and this year, when Mark Stoops and troops finished the regular season 9-3, UK would have been on the cusp of playoff discussion under a 12-team model (the Wildcats may have been a dispiriting defeat vs. Tennessee away from making a 12-team playoff both years).
Media speculation has valued the television revenue from a 12-team playoff at potentially $1 billion a year. That would be an increase of some $400 million annually from the current ESPN deal for a four-team bracket.
To me, that potential financial windfall is less compelling than the idea of expanding championship opportunity more broadly.
There are teams, universities and fan bases all around college football with little realistic chance to ever experience a four-team playoff that would have more viable shots at a 12-team field.
It seems clear a move to a 12-team playoff would be best for college football as a whole.
So it is a testament to the dysfunction that has come to define major-college sports that such a move, seemingly on path to happening in June, now appears near to collapse.
