Sankey: 12-Team Model is Best Option for Replacing Four-Team Playoff

If the College Football Playoff moves on from the current four-team model, the SEC commissioner prefers expanding to 12 teams.

Months after a move to a 12-team College Football Playoff seemed like an inevitability, Sports Illustrated's Ross Dellenger reports that it looks like that expansion could be tabled for another year. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey doesn't seem too broken up about that idea, given his league's domination of the four-team CFP system, though if expansion does come, he confirmed to Paul Finebaum that he prefers a 12-team model to eight teams, or some of the other ideas that have been floated in expansion talks.

“If we are going to move off the four-team format, the proposed 12-team model works well and compared to others, works best,” Sankey told Finebaum, per Dellenger. “We'll see if others are prepared to act.”

While the SEC has been open to the 12-team proposals, as opposed to major holdouts in the ACC and Big Ten, Sankey also indicated that he's very comfortable staying at four teams, given how much success his league has had in that format.

“Seventy-five percent of the time, we are winning the championship under the current format. We are comfortable continuing in that mode.” Sankey told Finebaum (the actual percentage will be 62.5% after either Alabama or Georgia win Monday's title game).

The SEC has won four of the seven College Football Playoffs, and has had at least one team in the title game in each of the last six years. Alabama and Georgia will play for the national title for a second time in five years on Monday. Dipping into the BCS era, the SEC has had 18 total teams play in the last 16 national championship games.

Even Sankey acknowledged that the deluge of SEC programs at the top of the sport may not be in the best interest of college football as a whole, with success and interest waning in high-population areas like the Northeast and West Coast.

“We all have a responsibility to make sure college football is strong across the nation…even though a four team playoff works for us, creating opportunities is a compelling reason to give a little bit.”

-SEC Commissioner @GregSankey

— Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) January 5, 2022

While the SEC is open to expansion, new ACC commissioner Jim Phillips has a major hangup with the original 12-team model, which did not build in an automatic qualifier for all Power Five champions, and per Dellenger's reporting, still favors eight teams. Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren also favors automatic qualifying bids for the Power Five champions.

Eight members of the CFP management committee still support the 12-team model first discussed in June, which would give bids to the six highest-ranked conference champions, regardless of whether they're Power 5 or Group of 5 programs, along with six at-large bids for the next six teams in the Playoff rankings.

In order to expand the Playoff before 2026, all 11 presidents voting on the proposals must unanimously approve of a change. Even with a projected $450 million increase in revenue with a move to 12 teams, that is far from a guarantee, Dellenger says.