Changes are coming to the College Football Playoff. The contract for the 12-team playoff expires at the end of the 2025 season, so that means new changes could once again come to the playoff beginnning with the 2026 season.
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey is one of the main figures of these CFP discussions, and Monday he shared three troubling details when it comes to these conversations.
Political agendas controlling CFP changes
The thing that might be the most troubling when hearing about the discussions among the powers at be is how they are handling this discussion. And there really is no better way to explain it then by sharing exactly what Sankey said.
“We are trying to find a format to determine, whatever number it is, the best teams in college football,” Sankey said via dawgnation.com. “We have used a political process to come to a decision inside a room … we should be using football to make football decisions.”
Hearing Sankey use the term "political process" sounds a little concerning, especially when he follows that up by saying they aren't using football to make this decision. To the average college football fan, it seems obvious that football should be the only thing used in making this decision, but political posturing is unfortunately taking over such an important decision.
The most likely new College Football Playoff format
The most likely format the College Football Playoff will shift to during the 2026 season is a 16-team playoff that will give the SEC and Big Ten four automatic bids into the field while the Big 12 and ACC get two bids each. The highest ranked Group of Five team will also be automatically included as well. This is another piece of information that is upsetting to a lot of college football fans as all fans want are the best teams to make it into the field, no matter what conference they come from.
When looking at the SEC alone however, this could be viewed as a good thing because it guarantees them 25 percent of the field. This is especially good for a program like Georgia, who will typically always find themselves inside the top four of the conference. Sankey however stated that he is “not committed at this point” to this format.
It's unclear what is holding him back from being all in on this format, but for now a format that seems good for the SEC may not be good enough for the SEC Commissioner.
Scheduling will take a hit in new CFP format
Last but not least, Sankey discussed how the expanded 12-team format has done some harm to the regular season and the precedent that is being set when it comes to scheduling. This past season, the committee made it clear that quality wins did not matter, the only thing that mattered was how many losses each team had.
This was bad news for a few SEC teams, as Sankey discussed.
“It’s clear that not losing (games) becomes more important than beating the University of Georgia, as two of our teams that were left out (3-loss Alabama and Ole Miss programs) did.”
This new 16-team format would potentially hurt the regular season even more as the only thing teams in the SEC will care about is earning one of the four automatic bids. So non-conference schedules will become irrelevant and teams will opt to schedule easy opponents instead of marquee matchups. Also, if a team has an automatic bid locked up before the regular season ends, they may choose to rest their starters in their final game like NFL teams do.
Overall, this new format seems to have a lot more negatives attached to it than positives. But it doesn't seem like anything is going to stop this from becoming the new norm in 2026, so hopefully these changes don't ruin the sport as much as some people think it will.