Elites in the SEC seem to be moving away from the idea of giving the conference four automatic bids into the future College Football Playoff. But it sounds like commissioner Greg Sankey never really liked the idea anyway. “Over time, I’ve been one that said I’d give no allocation… I’d just make it the 12 best teams, and I was clear on that,” Sankey said on The Dan Patrick Show.
“Allocation” is Sankey’s word for automatic qualifiers. It refers to a method that the SEC and Big Ten backed up until not long ago.
That plan called for four automatic bids for each league. The ACC and Big 12 would get two each, along with one for the Group of Six champion and three at-large bids.
The ACC and Big 12 didn’t like that idea at all, and it looks like the SEC, led by its commissioner, is now starting to agree with them too.
It was recently revealed that the SEC is no longer in favor of the four auto bid proposal. Instead, they are now in favor of the other option on the table: a so-called “5-11” format that gives spots to the five conference champions and 11 at-large bids that will be chosen by the selection committee.
“Oh no, we can’t do this. We’ve spent so much time building on and working through our own little side arguments about teams.” We need this. “You need to watch out for this or that bowl game,” Sankey said.
“We never went back to the essence of decision making, which is how our team was chosen as everyone moved around over the last four or five years,” he said. “Does the analysis that existed and worked for the four-team playoff in 2014 still have the same relevance? I think we’re behind the curve.”
But while the SEC seems to be backing away from the car bid idea, other regulators in the Big Ten are still in favor of it.
That’s because people in the Big Ten were worried that the SEC and ACC would get an unfair advantage in the win-loss score because they only play eight conference games a year and host an easy opponent late in the season, while the Big Ten plays nine league opponents.
The Big Ten is still largely the only conference that seems to support the automatic qualifier idea. Coaches from the SEC and the other conferences seem to prefer the 5-11 plan.
Mario Cristobal, head coach of Miami, and Pat Narduzzi, head coach of Pittsburgh, both spoke out against the idea of giving conferences guaranteed spots in the playoffs. They said that teams that deserve to be there should earn their spot through their play on the field.
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