Brandon Sloter/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
The College Football Playoff is in wait-and-see mode after an offseason of drastic conference realignment.
While the CFP is scheduled to increase to a 12-team format starting in the 2024 season, the criteria for inclusion in that expanded field is still unknown since the Pac-12 may very well not even exist.
CFP executive director Bill Hancock addressed that reality following a Wednesday meeting between the 10 FBS commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick.
“To the matter of conference realignment, we’re going to have to wait and see,” Hancock said, per Heather Dinich of ESPN. “We’re going to have to wait until the dust settles before making any decisions about how that might affect CFP. The fact is, we just don’t know yet. No one knows how conference realignment is going to wind up, and it would just be premature to make any decisions about it.”
Dinich noted the model that was in place prior to this summer of change called for the five Power 5 conference champions, the highest-ranked Group of 5 champion and six at-large bids in the field.
Yet the Pac-12 is one of those Power 5 conferences. With USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington heading to the Big Ten and Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah going to the Big 12, the league may not even exist in the near future.
That’s not even mentioning the chance that Cal, Stanford, Oregon State and Washington State could all head to different conferences at some point as well.
According to Dinich, there are two models that could be under consideration. One would simply have 12 at-large teams make up the entire field, while the other would call for the five highest-ranked conference champions plus seven at-large teams in a system that would more closely mirror the one that was initially scheduled to be put in place.
That latter system would open up more opportunities for teams outside the top 12 and those that are not in the Power 5 leagues.
Yet the argument against that would be that it didn’t feature the 12 best teams in the country.
It isn’t a stretch to suggest the SEC and Big Ten will have the majority of the nation’s powerhouse programs in the coming years with Texas and Oklahoma joining an SEC that already has Georgia, Alabama, LSU and Tennessee, among others, and USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington going to a Big Ten that already has Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Wisconsin and others.
A CFP with 12 at-large bids could be dominated by the two leagues, which would surely be favored by the SEC and Big Ten but something other conferences may rally against.
For now, the situation is on hold until the realignment dust has fully settled.
