Destiny, Florida – Lane Kiffin, voice of reason.
This is where university football is on its last long and winding trip to a new post-season format.
The expansion of the play football playoffs was the hottest subject during the dry meetings this week, because the conference considers the best way to ensure that the rest of university football correctly respects its authority.
Extension of the CFP field from 12 to 16 teams for 2026 And Beyond seems inevitable at this stage, but it is how, not the number, it takes a while to meet. The subject is to have everyone implied a little tested, Including the SEC commissioner, Greg Sankey.
Sankey and the rest of the conference commissioners who make up the CFP The management committee is debating several models with various numbers of offers and automatic qualifications, identified by combined locking codes such as 5-11 and 4-4-2-1-3.
Several dry coaches this week gave their opinion on what they would like to see in an eliminatory format, and most responded with a form of “above my remuneration note” while noting that it is very, very difficult to play in the dry. Thank you, coach!
Leave him to Kiffin, Ole Miss coach and the social media antagonator, to be more direct.
“The best system should be 16 years (teams) and should be the best 16,” said Kiffin.
He added that a selection process focused on metrics without automatic qualifications is probably the way to follow, with a committee made up of members who have no conflicts of obvious interests
“Probably the media that looks the most, which are there and have no other reasons, and discover the 16 best teams,” said Kiffin.
Kiffin spoke with journalists after the SEC coaches had several hours of meetings with Sankey and the sports directors, where they discussed formats and models.
“They spoke – I will call it a 5-11 model – and our own ability to win these places,” said Sankey on Tuesday afternoon during his daily liquidation session with journalists. “The question is, why wouldn’t it be well? Why won’t we do that? We talked about 16 with them. So, a good conversation, not a destination, but the first time I had the ability to really go deep with ideas with them.”
Some of the other coaches were likely to participate in the great debate in the playoffs before these meetings, but the conferences of the Hilton Sanestine were certainly not the first time that the subject arose.
“I think I have a good understanding of the place where he is and the decisions that must be made, to which I do not think these decisions get an answer here,” said Georgia coach Kirby Smart, whose Bulldogs won two national titles in the PCF with four teams before they lose the quarter -finals of the first 12 teams last.
Smart has also echoed the Sankey’s remarks from the day before, when he spoke of balance what is best for the conference and to be one of the guards of the game.
“I do not look at him in a mode of self-preservation, which happens a lot in university football. These meetings are thus. The conferences are thus,” said Smart, who threw a reference not so dressed in his former boss, Nick Saban. “I have learned of the best of the company you are trying to keep the game constantly and improve the game, and not just to do it for what is best for me or simply for self-service.”
Of course, Smart then noted that the SEC had established a record for the teams of the NCAA male basketball tournament (14), set a record of 13 teams in the regional baseball championships and will have five of the eight teams in competition in the Women’s College World Series in Oklahoma City this weekend.
“But when you look at what they can do, there is no upset, and there is no one who beats a drum saying that it is completely unfair. They do a lot of things based on RPI. They do a lot according to the calendar strength, and they reward the teams for that,” said smart. “I find it difficult to see in Ole Miss, Alabama, in South Carolina, not one of the best teams last year.”
And that’s it.
The CFP selections of last year are currently faced with a refiction, both among online fans and in the background for actual discussions between decision -makers.
The dry received three offers, while the Big Ten had four. The ACC has seized an additional offer with the victory of the match for the title of the Clemson conference, which mainly struck the CFP Alabama to 12 teams, even if the Crimson Tide was 11th in the final classification of the Committee.
“You are wondering in a way what would happen if other people would have had the chance to play our schedule last year,” said Alabama coach Kalen Deboer, whose first Crimson Tide team beat Georgia but lost against Vanderbilt (7-6) and Oklahoma (6-7) on the way to one 9-4.
The Kiffin rebels, who also beat the Bulldogs of the SCMAR SEC champion, finished 14th in the CFP ranking, and the South Carolina, which beat the ACC Clemson, had a place in front of the tigers at 15 years old.
It is undeniable that the current composition of the dry, with the addition of Texas and Oklahoma, has created a degree of difficulty which is difficult to correspond to other conferences.
Sucizer the complaints of the dry concerning the PCF selections of last year – and No one complains stronger (can publications on social networks be noisy?) That Kiffin – was the fact that Ole Miss cost a place in a playoff series by losing at home against a Kentucky team who did not win another dry match, and finished a 4-8 season with a brutal defeat against the ACC rival, Louisville.
If the Kiffin model – let’s call it 16-0 – had been in place last year, the CFP would have included six dry teams.
Problem solved, right?
Not so fast. The sports directors of the dry seem to be in love with the idea of several automatic offers, predetermined for each Power 4 conference (four each for the dry and big ten). This idea came from the Big Tony Petitti Commissioner last year. Automatic offers would help reinvent the weekend of the championship by adding high issues Intraconference game games (that is to say a new television inventory), essentially transforming the selection committee into a Sowing committee.
“We are so used to selection committees in university athletics, because we have these sports that play a lot of games. And you can make it work with the committee,” said Florida Ad Scott Stricklin. “The committee is never ideal, right?”
“It is really difficult to do it in a way without committee, and a committee simply does not seem to be a very good way to do university football. I therefore think that everything we can do to make the series and less subjective eliminations will be better. That you can do another way than automation? I do not know, but I think that is the goal.
The new eliminatory format will have an impact directly on the decision of the SEC on the advisability of adding an additional conference game to its schedules, going from eight to nine. Without a certain type of insurance according to which the addition of an additional conference game will not prevent the teams from being in the CFP, the dry may well stay with eight games.
“I think nine games make sense for many different reasons, but that does not make sense to us if we are not guaranteed to be protected,” said Texas A&M sports director, Trev Alberts.
It looks very much like automatic offers without calling for automatic offers.
Advertisements have more hold than coaches in these discussions, but Sankey will ultimately be advised in the format to be supported when he returns with his colleagues commissioners.
Big Ten has expressed its position on automatic offers, and almost everyone thinks it’s a bad idea. But the CFP is no longer a democracy. The new contract which strikes next year gives Big Ten and the dry the power to cross what they want on the objections of their colleagues.
There is still hope among some CFP leaders that Sankey, who has seen how an unpopular post-season system can provide contempt and careful examination on university football, could provide resistance to AQs.
How realistic it is at this stage is at best questionable. The uncertainty of the CFP will persist in June. The next meeting of the management committee is scheduled for June 17 in Asheville, NC
Unfortunately, Kiffin is not invited.
(Photo: James Gilbert / Getty Images)
