By Teddy Greenstein
Chicago Tribune
Hungering for an expansion of the four-team College Football Playoff?
As Lee Corso would put it: “Not so fast, my friend.”
After a meeting of conference commissioners Monday before the Alabama-Clemson national title game, CFP board member Mark Keenum shot down the possibility in a statement.
“It’s way too soon —much too soon —to know if (expansion) is even a possibility,” said Keenum, also Mississippi State’s president. “It’s fair to say speculation about expansion has outdistanced the reality of what the commissioners and the presidents have discussed. If a decision were to be made down the road, the presidents would be the ones to make it and we are not there. … We have a 12-year contract we are very happy with.”
That 12-year deal commenced with the 2014 season and Ohio State’s surge into the playoff, which the Buckeyes won with victories over Alabama and Oregon.
The Big Ten, though, has been shut out of the last two playoffs, and its champion has been bypassed three straight years. Commissioner Jim Delany’s frustration with that —and his view that the selection committee should give more weight to conference champions —seemed to fuel his public desire for discussion about expansion.
Advocates of the current system argue that expanding to six or eight teams would water down the regular season, be unfair to the non-salaried players who already log up to 15 games and harm the non-playoff bowls. Plus in a season like this, any expansion likely still would have resulted in an Alabama-Clemson final.
“Academics, student-athlete well-being, existing contractual agreements and the overall good of the game are just a few of the issues we are considering,” Keenum said in the statement.
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said he believes “four is the right number” and his conference will not give up its lucrative title game to keep the total number of potential games at 15.
“The SEC championship game was innovative, in many ways is still innovative; people have followed with their own,” Sankey said in a statement. “Every FBS conference now has its own championship game. It’s a common-sense way in an era of conference expansion to determine a conference champion. It’s an incredibly relevant game, high-level competition, and it’s important to the SEC.”
