The College Football Playoff will expand from its current four. There is no doubt about that. The ACC, which helped block a move toward expansion last summer, would be wise to be on board.
The conference, according to commissioner Jim Phillips, “continues to be supportive of an expanded college football playoff,” Phillips said at last week’s ACC Football Kickoff in Charlotte.
The decision to stand in opposition to last summer’s CFP expansion proposal, done with Alliance partners in the Big Ten and Pac-12, was based, Phillips said, “on what we feel we must all come together to address before rushing into a new model – the implementation of a 365-day calendar, health and safety, and several other items that you know well.”
“Engagement is ongoing with our schools and my fellow commissioners to chart a path forward prior to the expiration of the current CFP contract in 2026,” Phillips said last week. “We had two great meetings in April and in June, and I’m confident that our concerns and others’ concerns will be addressed, and a new model with greater access will ultimately come to pass.
“We will do our part in the ACC to make it happen, but there’s some more work to be done,” Phillips said.
From “more work to be done,” we get to the news out of this week’s Big Ten football media days, which is, the B1G is ready to go full steam ahead with a playoff expansion.
“I can live with 12, I can live with 16. I just think we need to expand,” former Wisconsin AD Barry Alvarez told ESPN on Tuesday. “I think access is important. I can live with 16.”
Alvarez’s comments here are important because his job title now is Big Ten special adviser for football.
A current Big Ten AD, Gene Smith at Ohio State, meanwhile, made it clear that he backs a 16-team playoff.
“Sixteen just seems to be out there,” Smith said. “You can’t ignore it.”
And Big Ten commish Kevin Warren, for his part, is “100 percent supportive” of a playoff expansion.
“It’s heavy on my radar. Someone had raised it to me probably about six months ago, and then it seems like over the last couple weeks, it’s been raised a lot,” Warren told ESPN on Tuesday. “Yes, it’s been coming up a lot lately, but that’s why I think going through this stage of conference realignment and expansion, it’d be interesting to see where all that lands. I don’t know what the right number is, but it’s this interesting the people have raised it to me, it has been an interesting proposal.”
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey reminded the world at his conference’s media event last week that the SEC has been on board with a deeper playoff all along.
“People rejected that, not me,” Sankey told ESPN last week. “And so now, as I look at the future, I was clear at that time trying to take a step back, because we weren’t unanimous for the format. That’s my responsibility to move people along. And I give our membership a lot of credit. I heard from others that they were unanimously against. I mean, I’ll stop my commentary there.”
There’s no good reason now, as was the case last summer, for the ACC to oppose an expansion, which would mean gobs more money from TV, with the CFP providing its TV partners 15 games of playoff inventory, a big step up from the current three.
More teams and more games mean more payouts for conferences.
The ACC is money-strapped as it is, with a relatively low-dollar TV contract with ESPN locked in through 2036.
It may be that the only way around making less money from TV than the SEC and Big Ten is competing on the field of play for CFP and NCAA Tournament berths and then winning games.
Share
Chris Graham
