Two ruling parties are controlling college football: the Big Ten and SEC. And they’re about to light the whole thing aflame.
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Mandel: Arrogance of Big Ten, SEC leaders on full display in New Orleans college football meetings
By
Stewart Mandel
For two decades, every hare-brained development in college football could be boiled down to a simple explanation: “No one is in charge.”
Today, however, two indisputable ruling parties are controlling the sport: the Big Ten and SEC. And they’re about to light the whole thing aflame.
Leaders of the two leagues
are meeting this week in New Orleans, where they’re expected to push forward with a full-on takeover of the College Football Playoff. Beginning in 2026, the field would expand to 14 or 16 teams, and the Power 2 would grant themselves four automatic berths each. The ACC and Big 12 would get two, the Group of 5 one, leaving just one or three at-larges.
It’s a ludicrous and unnecessary provision, one made possible by the fact that the Power 2 conferences already negotiated themselves favored nation status in the new CFP contract that begins next year. The previous version required unanimous agreement among the 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame to make changes to the format. The Big Ten and SEC now get to dictate changes to the others.
While the four-bid idea was first discussed a year ago, before the 2024 season played out, behold the arrogance if the SEC pushes it through immediately after landing just three bids last season.
The first year of the 12-team CFP exposed some largely fixable flaws in the format when it came to seeding and byes. But for the most part, it achieved exactly what was intended. New faces — Arizona State, Indiana, SMU — got to enjoy their moment in the sun. The entire bowl season got a much-needed interest boost from those mid-December games. And No. 8 seed Ohio State and No. 7 seed Notre Dame earned their way to the championship game rather than getting voted into the semifinals like before.
What better way to undermine the event’s credibility before it has barely started than by formally stacking the deck for two conferences that were likely to dominate the tournament anyway with or without special provisions.
Big Ten and SEC leaders will tell you it’s a necessary acknowledgment of the post-realignment landscape as if they themselves didn’t orchestrate the whole thing. Oklahoma and Texas didn’t slip and fall into the SEC. And the Pac-12 would still exist if the Big Ten didn’t decide to add two schools (USC and UCLA) located 2,000 miles from the league office.
Big Ten and SEC leaders will point out the numbers are essentially right in line with how many bids those leagues would have earned on average historically. That’s true, but that doesn’t mean they should be preordained. What if a conference has a down year — like the SEC did just last season?
Finally, Big Ten and SEC leaders will spin this as a means to reduce subjectivity in the system. Rather than allowing the selection committee to use its ever-shifting criteria to determine most of the participants, we can just go by their own league standings. As if the leagues’ own convoluted tiebreakers aren’t themselves confusing and arbitrary.
Had this model been in place last season, the SEC’s four berths would have gone to Texas (7-1 in league play), Georgia (6-2), Tennessee (6-2) and whoever emerged from a six-way tie among 5-3 teams Alabama, LSU, Ole Miss, Missouri, South Carolina and Texas A&M. One decimal point difference in the cumulative win percentage column would be the difference between making the CFP and making the ReliaQuest Bowl.
The great irony here is those conferences (and all the others) have spent the past four years decrying other major changes to the sport — the so-called “Wild, Wild West” of NIL and the transfer portal — that have thus far had no negative effect on the product whatsoever. If anything, they’ve helped disperse talent and create more parity, making the Playoff more attainable for more of their members.
But that doesn’t mean college football is indestructible. The single biggest threat to its popularity is the most recent cycle of realignment-gone-wild, which cost 12 West Coast schools their natural rivals, exiled two (Oregon State and Washington State) to Siberia and has effectively told every fan base outside the Big Ten and SEC that their school is unimportant. Legislating that distinction into the Playoff will alienate large swaths of the country.
All for something that is completely unnecessary.
The Big Ten and SEC are going to combine for eight berths more often than not. Maybe Notre Dame siphons off one from time to time like it did last season. In other years, however, the Power 2 might get nine, with the ACC, Big 12 and G5 getting one bid each.
And the Big Ten and SEC are already pocketing more money than the others. They granted themselves each 29 percent of the revenue from the CFP’s new six-year deal with ESPN that averages $1.3 billion a year, compared with 17 percent for the ACC and 15 percent for the Big 12. Those larger cuts for the Big Ten and SEC equate to more than $21 million per school, more than triple their share of the previous deal.
But apparently, that wasn’t enough. The addition of at least two more CFP games will garner even more television money. Here’s betting it won’t be divided equally. And, of course, the inevitable next step will be for the Big Ten and SEC to create their own versions of the NBA Play-In Tournament to see who gets those third and fourth auto-berths. More money, more money, more money.
But at what cost?
The Big Ten and SEC have by far the most national-brand programs between them that will always get the highest TV ratings and the biggest crowds. But they also comprise just 25 percent of all FBS schools.
It’s not generally a winning formula to alienate 75 percent of your customers. But the two ruling parties are only governing for themselves.
