Greg Sankey flexes.

How ‘ya doing there, Alliance?  The SEC Commissioner says hi.

… The playoff will remain at four teams through the 2025 season, when the current contract expires, but after that, “There’s nothing that exists after Year 12,” Sankey said at the Associated Press Sports Editors Southeast regional meeting. “There’s not the bowl relationships; there’s not a media relationship; there’s not a College Football Playoff format come the 2026 season.”

So from Sankey’s perspective?

“We can stay at four,” he said. “This conference will thrive at four. Period. That’s not healthy for the rest of FBS college football, but we can stay at four.”

You sure about that, Greg?  I mean, how can you expect to stand pat with a mere four-team CFP field?

Two SEC teams faced off in last season’s CFP National Championship, with Georgia beating Alabama, 33-18. Twelve of the last 16 national champs are SEC teams, and in the eight-year history of the College Football Playoff, the SEC is the only conference with a qualifying team every season. The last three national champions are Georgia, Alabama and LSU.

“People apparently didn’t take me seriously when I said we can leave it at four,” Sankey said. “So I sat there watching that (Alabama-Georgia) game, thinking they just thought I wasn’t serious.”

Sounds like we’re headed towards a fun poker game before 2026.

It’s the CFP’s world and we’re all just living in it.

Welp, let’s just water down the regular season a little more, NCAA.

Currently, a conference must play a full round-robin schedule to hold a championship game if it does not have two divisions, as the Big 12 has done since 2017. (The American Athletic Conference has operated for the last two years with an exemption waiver.)

But on April 28, the NCAA Football Oversight Committee recommended the Division I Council remove the requirements to hold a conference championship game and exempt it from the maximum number of games. This recommendation, which is not official but expected to be approved by the Council later this month, would allow conferences freedom to determine who competes in the conference championship game.

I mean, who can argue against freedom, right?  Especially if it means being free to deliver the best seedings for the college football playoffs.  Talk about your righteous cause!

And before some of you jump my case about how much it sucks that Georgia doesn’t go to College Station for two more years and that needs to be fixed… well, I agree that it sucks, but nobody’s holding a gun to Greg Sankey’s head to make him stick to an eight-game conference schedule.  All this bullshit is a matter of choice for the P5 and right now the desire is to make the regular season the most efficient postseason delivery operation it can be.

Although I have to admit it’s amusing, in a sad sort of way, that these humps can tweak the regular season like this, but still can’t figure out a way to expand the CFP.

Today, in tortured analogies

Of all the hot takes in the world, this is certainly one of them.

That horse winning the Kentucky Derby today, is good example of why an expanded college football playoff is needed. That horse hadn’t won all the races leading up, but it got its chance and that’s what happened.

— Mike Leach (@Coach_Leach) May 8, 2022

“We’re not talking about it.”

I keep telling myself I shouldn’t get my hopes up about it, but the clown show that is college football playoff expansion has entered a new phase, and I’m loving it.

The sun was shining Wednesday afternoon at the sprawling Four Seasons resort as the 10 FBS commissioners and College Football Playoff executive director Bill Hancock gathered in person for the first time since their tense playoff expansion meetings at the national championship game in Indianapolis almost four months ago.

And yet, there was no change on where they left matters, as they avoided any substantive discussions this week about the future of their sport’s postseason.

“We’re not talking about it,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said bluntly during a break between the annual meetings, which instead focused on the usual mundane playoff recaps with bowl partners, ESPN television executives and athletic directors who participated in the 2022 CFP.

As far as the topic of expansion was concerned, Sankey compared it to the sitcom “Seinfeld”: a “show about nothing.”

This placid meet-up was a complete reversal from months of sometimes contentious conversations and stressful meetings that boiled over and played out publicly until they ultimately culminated in February with an 8-3 vote that will keep the four-team format in place for four more years. For now, the issue of college football’s championship format beyond the 2025 season is on pause — most likely for another year. No expansion meetings are currently scheduled, and no changes have been made to how the four best teams are determined.

“I don’t sense any momentum for conversations on the side at the moment,” Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick told ESPN recently.

But they can avoid it for only so long.

A decade or so would work just fine for me, thank you very much.

Go home, FPI. You’re drunk.

I don’t care what anyone says.  Preseason or not, any computer with a projection that has Auburn — Auburn! — as the nation’s tenth best team needs to be stripped down completely and re-programmed.

That being said, if I’m forced to take FPI seriously, it’s worth noting that it only finds four teams with better than a 10% chance of making the playoffs.  Look for that fun stat to make a steady appearance in opinion columns about Why We Need CFP Expansion NOW! near you.

Even more interesting to me, though, is that Georgia, despite being in a much tougher conference and having to factor co-existence with Alabama into the equation, is seen as having a significantly better chance of making and winning the playoffs than does Clemson.

Look what we’re missing.

I know this kind of chatter is a given, due to the time of year, but, please, just stop already ($$).

Parity is often a myth in sports. It doesn’t make the journey to a title, or all of the games that it takes to get to that point, any less exciting.

It’s why college football has arguably the best regular season of any sport. It’s why men’s college basketball has arguably the best championship tournament of any sport.

And these past two weeks — right up to this weekend’s results themselves — have illustrated exactly what college football will be missing the next few years after it punted on implementing Playoff expansion before 2026.

What, you mean bigger paychecks for the P5?

But as followers of the sport, we can certainly continue to scratch our heads and wonder what could have been. Sure, Georgia and Alabama would probably still hold sizable advantages, as the two have squared off for the national title twice now in the past five years and have consistently recruited at a rate that distances them from their peers.

In the end, the results are the results. A blueblood, more often than not, will be the last team standing.

But does that make Alabama’s loss at Texas A&M earlier in the season any less exciting? Or dim the moment when Michigan, another CFP participant this past year, was upset by rival Michigan State in the regular season?

We have that now, sport.  What are we missing?

Imagine more of that, but with higher stakes. There will probably never be a Saint Peter’s-like run — there are only 130 FBS programs, to men’s college basketball’s 350 — but the idea that a Kentucky- or Purdue-like college football program could find itself in a tight postseason battle with a Group of 5 team that has been experiencing a Cinderella-like stretch is pretty tantalizing to think about.

Higher stakes?  Yeah, Kentucky battling SMU for the right to get the shit kicked out of them by Alabama is the stuff dreams are made of.  I don’t think “tantalizing” means what he thinks it means.

The reason there will never be a Saint Peter’s-like run — fuck the word “probably” — is because college football is wired in an entirely different way from college basketball.  And that’s not because the field is smaller; it’s because rosters are even more unbalanced.

Again, it’s all a moot point.  The suits will expand the CFP because the money is there, period.  This “look what March Madness can teach us about CFP expansion” argument is quintessential jamming a round peg in a square hole-type thinking.  Quit wasting our time with it.

Parity, my ass

I’m sensing a pattern here.

National Champions with their Preseason AP Rank

2021 #5 UGA
2020 #3 Bama
2019 #6 LSU
2018 #2 Clemson
2017 #1 Alabama
2016 #2 Clemson
2015 #3 Alabama
2014 #5 tOSU
2013 #11 FSU
2012 #2 Alabama
2011 #2 Alabama
2010 #22 Auburn
2009 #5 Alabama

Is the "dark horse" champion dead? pic.twitter.com/nAk1De0cul

— CFB Home (@CFBHome) March 29, 2022

When was it ever alive?

March madness

The Cindis of the basketball world crashed and failed before any could reach the Final Four, but for Chris Vannini, who’s an advocate of CFP expansion, that’s a feature, not a bug.

An all-blueblood Final Four actually shows why the CFP should have expanded.

The most talented teams are at the end (even UNC) like football, but the journey there was full of fun and drama. A lot more fanbases were engaged late, had something to play for and had some hope.

— Chris Vannini (@ChrisVannini) March 27, 2022

Yeah, who needs a compelling regular season and conference playoff, anyway?

Football’s postseason expansion will be driven by money, like every other one (including college basketball’s), so I can’t really get too worked up by his “CFP expansion cannot fail; it can only be failed” take.  It would have been a lot quicker to admit to a love of brackets and call it a day, though.

Here Finebaum is now, CFP. Entertain him.

Watch Finebaum try to thread the needle between being a complete SEC fanboy and bitching about how the possibility of playoff expansion has been set back because of bad blood between Sankey and the Alliance.  It’s hilarious.

He’s so flummoxed by the situation that, even has he advocates for expansion, he can’t help but acknowledge there usually aren’t even four teams in a given season worthy of national title consideration.

The conferences want the money expansion brings and the pundits want the increase in talking points.  If they have to trash the status quo a little to get there, so be it.  What more do we need, college football fans?

Kumbaya, CFP

Sounds like this is going about as we expected.

“The notion of just granting conference champions the top four seeds, we’re going to rethink that.” — SEC commissioner Greg Sankey to me and @PeterBurnsESPN on @SXMCollege when asked about re-evaluating CFP format ideas.

— Andy Staples (@Andy_Staples) March 11, 2022

Which is to say, not well at all.  Nicely played, Alliance.