The hot topic of conversation here at SEC spring meetings is the size of the College Football Playoff. It’s a 12-team field right now, but should it be 16? What about 24?
Opinions are mixed, which isn’t terribly surprising. Some coaches say increased access is critically important, especially as the league moves to a grueling nine-game conference schedule. Others want to preserve the SEC championship game; its future existence would be very much in doubt with an expanded CFP, especially one that doubles the size of the current bracket.
Texas A&M coach Mike Elko had perhaps the most candid take on the whole ordeal. First, he reminded reporters that coaches’ preferences don’t really matter. They can provide input to the overall expansion discussion, but they won’t get a final say.
And, if he’s being honest, coaches are going to act in their own self-interest anyway. Which, frankly, is a central part of the entire expansion debate.
“There’s self-preservation, right?” Elko said Tuesday. “If you really ask me, on the record, what does Mike Elko want? I want 40, because then I’ll make it, and then I won’t get fired.”
A reporter told Elko that, at some point, making a hypothetical 40-team CFP wouldn’t be enough and he could still get fired after securing a spot (and subsequently losing).
“That’ll take a few years,” he said with a smile. “Then, I’ll want something else.”
In all seriousness, Elko’s point is right. Of course coaches want a bigger CFP field because they are judged on making or missing the Playoff. For that reason, he says it’s not even worth asking coaches about this.
“None of us are answering for the good of the sport,” Elko said. “We are answering for the good of ourselves.”
That’s the quiet part, said out loud. That’s the biggest benefit of an expanded Playoff in an era where it’s Playoff-or-bust — more teams can say they had a successful season. That includes teams lower on the food chain, programs that have a hard time breaking into the sport’s uppermost echelon.
Texas coach Steve Sarkisian took issue with the way we — media, fans, boosters — frame success and failure.
“I feel for people because there are only 12 teams that get in, and we have close to 70 Power Four schools,” Sarkisian said. “The disappointment for the majority of these fan bases [is] because they all live with a Playoff-or-bust mentality.”
The markers of success from the past aren’t the same anymore. We don’t celebrate simply making bowl games, or an Outback Bowl, or even a New Year’s Six game. Anything outside of the CFP is perceived as a failure, which is why players started opting out of those games — and continue to opt out of those games.
“We’re minimizing the value of an SEC championship, all with the hopes of just winning a national championship, and one team gets one of those,” Sarkisian said. “One of the beauties of college sports and of college football for a long, long time — when there was no BCS, there was nothing — they just figured out who the champion was. We went to two teams, and then we went to four teams, and even at four teams, it was like, ‘OK, we know who those four are. The rest of these teams can have really good seasons and celebrate their seasons.’
“Now, we’ve gotten to 12, and the tables have turned. I watched a coach get fired five games into a season last year after having been in the semifinals the year before, — that’s concerning to me about the health of our sport. … Gosh, to just to hang one carrot out there that we’re all chasing every single year with a format that’s really not conducive for everybody to have an opportunity to win it, that’s a scary proposition to me.”
It makes all the sense in the world that a high-profile coach with an expensive roster would feel that way. But it’s also why we’re in the middle of an expansion debate two years into the 12-team CFP era — because coaches and those pouring money into their programs need landing spots.
“When you start talking about, like, ‘Oh, well, this team didn’t get in, so we have to expand it,’ and then, ‘this team didn’t get in, so we have to expand it more’ … Like, the cool thing about our sport is it has always been a challenge to get into the Playoff,” Elko said. “Every year there are good teams — whether it was four, whether it’s 12 — there are good football teams who don’t make it.
“It’s OK to make it hard to get into the Playoff.”
He’s not alone in feeling that way, but the voices on the other side of the debate are pretty loud. The Big Ten coaches were unified in their support of the 24-team field. There’s a lot of support in the ACC and Big 12 as well. A number of other SEC coaches are open to a bracket that big as long as it doesn’t push the CFP title game back further.
And while the coaches don’t get a final say — SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said he doesn’t think his coaches all have the same opinion on this topic, and he’s not sure he needs consensus on the issue anyway — it’s still helpful when they admit what’s really driving the debate, which is why we ask the questions. Self-preservation is the answer, but will it be enough to double the size of the bracket? We’ll soon find out.