SEC leaders show support (and some trepidation) for College Football Playoff play-in games

New York Times

28-05-2025

DESTIN, Fla. — Everybody who watched the SEC championship last year remembers Texas and Georgia's back-and-forth battle, ending in a 22-19 overtime win for the Bulldogs. Some said the game didn't really matter because both teams were going to the College Football Playoff, but the losing coach of that game, Texas' Steve Sarkisian, still sounded ticked more than six months later.
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'It means something to win an SEC championship, and anybody that tells you it's diminished, they're lying,' Sarkisian said Tuesday at SEC spring meetings. 'It means a lot in our building and I'm sure in everybody else's building.'
And yet you can sense here that something is evolving, the best evidence being the equivocation Tuesday by Kirby Smart, who coached Georgia to that win for his third SEC championship.
'I enjoy the SEC championship, I'm a firm believer in that,' Smart said. 'But I'm going to support whatever, as a conference, we choose to do in that format.'
The SEC is mulling a drastic change for as soon as next year that could entail the elimination of the championship game or the addition of more games to the final weekend before the Playoff is set. The change seems predicated on whether the SEC and Big Ten receive automatic bids in the next CFP format. If they do, both conferences are eyeing these play-in games to the CFP.
"This idea of somebody's gonna go 16-0 in college football. Man, put a statue up somewhere of that team. Because I just don't know if that's gonna happen again." – Steve Sarkisian at SEC spring meetings in Destin pic.twitter.com/owpfYkfGeR
— The Next Round (@NextRoundLive) May 27, 2025
'It's an intriguing deal,' Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin said. 'We want to keep our options open and give our commissioner as much latitude as possible to kind of take the conversations in the direction he feels like it needs to be. But it's an intriguing idea.'
The idea is still conceptual, conference officials cautioned, but if the automatic bids are secured, the play-in idea grows more likely. The most firm option was first floated in the Big Ten: The top two seeds would still play in the championship game, with both assured bids, while the next four teams would be matched in two play-in games. The non-championship games would likely be at campus sites. This is what it would have looked like by last year's SEC standings:
Championship: No. 1 Texas vs. No. 2 Georgia
Play-in: No. 3 Tennessee vs. No. 6 South Carolina
Play-in: No. 4 Alabama vs. No. 5 LSU
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A more radical proposal has been floated in the SEC, where the top eight teams would be matched in tournament-style seeding, with the winners of the four games getting the automatic bids.
• No. 1 Texas vs. No. 8 Ole Miss
• No. 2 Georgia vs. No. 7 Texas A&M
• No. 3 Tennessee vs. No. 6 South Carolina
• No. 4 Alabama vs. No. 5 LSU
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey downplayed this option, and Smart probably spoke for many when he decried the risk it would put on the top seed.
'I don't want to devalue the regular season,' Smart said. 'I don't think a team like Texas last year, they were the No. 1 seed going into the SEC championship, there's some scenarios where they have a play-in game? I don't agree with that. They can play a championship game, but there should be some value to a regular season in terms of what you perform and what you do. You don't see a basketball regular season champion go in the SEC tournament, play, and then not make the (NCAA) tournament.'
The reason the eight-team field is even being considered is that it would involve more teams. Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne pointed to a common sentiment within the conference to keep more teams and fan bases engaged late in the season as a big motivation.
'It's obviously important that you want to go deeper in the year for everybody involved to feel like, hey, there's still a lot on the line, and that's healthy for everybody,' Byrne said.
This is also seen as a way to essentially correct regular-season standings that may be deceiving because of different schedules. Indiana, which went 11-1 with help from an easier Big Ten schedule, is last year's most cited example.
In the SEC, the play-ins could be a way to solve tiebreakers like last year, where the six teams that finished fourth through ninth had 5-3 conference records. Of course, one team would have been locked out of the eight-team play-in format last fall, and three would have been locked out of the six-team format. But the hope is that a nine-game league schedule, which also is likely in a world with automatic bids, would lead to less crowded standings.
'When teams are playing difficult schedules, we're talking about the difference of one loss or maybe one more quality win that might vault them into a spot they might not have been otherwise, then it becomes attractive,' Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione said.
There, of course, would be another beneficiary: ESPN, which would get two or three more meaningful games, and the SEC would get a cut of that. 'I know a lot of that's going to be determined by television revenue,' Smart said.
But the major driving force is clear: Removing the CFP selection committee from the decision-making process. The NCAA uses a selection committee for other sports, which have bigger fields and feature seasons where teams play more games. Football is naturally much more subjective, Stricklin said.
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'I don't know that given the size of college football, with the few number of games we play, and the disparity in the quality of the different conferences, if we're ever going to get to a point where nationally, it's going to make sense the way we all want it to,' Stricklin said. 'And so I think we have to be honest about that and be creative.'
Stricklin, in a long talk with reporters on Tuesday, cautioned that the play-in idea is just one in a lot of 'blue-sky thinking.' He mentioned the idea circulated a few years ago of the SEC going its own way and forming its own Playoff, something Stricklin said he doesn't want. But he also doesn't believe the current selection committee model, without automatic bids, is sustainable.
Sankey was asked if the play-in format would dilute the regular season and answered by referring to those who said the 12-team Playoff would dilute the regular season.
'I can tell you I was at the Georgia-Alabama game, Week 3 … that was a pretty incredible night,' Sankey said. 'I think everybody competed at the highest level as hard as they could. And we had that over and over. So I think these absolutes on what does and does not dilute the regular season are kind of older conversations.'
Still, concerns remain. Sarkisian pointed to fan travel: Texas fans (if they chose) went to Atlanta for the SEC championship, then back to Austin for a first-round CFP game, then back to Atlanta for the quarterfinals, then to Dallas for the semifinals. And Texas had it relatively easy compared to other teams.
It's just one caution for Sarkisian, who didn't say he was against the idea but opined that a conference championship still matters to players. And to the coach himself.
'Everybody wants more teams, everybody wants more games, TV wants more games, I get all that,' Sarkisian said. 'But let's not lose sight of some of those things that we got into this sport for a long time ago, that still mean a lot, to a lot of us.'
(Top photo of fans in the stands at the 2024 SEC Championship game between Texas and Georgia: Butch Dill / Getty Images)