SEC Spring Meetings notebook: CFP concerns, self-governance threats and more

DESTIN, Fla. — It is no secret that the SEC will have each of its football teams playing nine conference opponents this fall. It’s something the coaches keep bringing up because they are concerned — and not because that half of them will pick up a loss they wouldn’t otherwise.
 
The SEC football coaches are worried that they won’t be rewarded for making a challenging schedule even tougher. Their angst was apparent here at SEC spring meetings after the group met with College Football Playoff executive director Rich Clark this week.
 
“He was in a no-win situation with all the SEC coaches, a couple in there that thought they should have been in (the CFP),” LSU coach Lane Kiffin said. “That probably wasn’t going to be a great meeting for him.”
 
Still, Kiffin said that the meeting was informative. The coaches learned more about the metrics that the selection committee uses and looked at examples of how they affected the evaluation of last year’s teams. But they came out of the meeting concerned that they aren’t getting enough credit for the depth and talent in the SEC.
 
“The human element in there is an issue,” Kiffin said.
 
Georgia coach Kirby Smart said “there may be some regret” going to a nine-game SEC schedule with the current 12-team CFP format. He said he didn’t want to blame the committee itself, but…
 
“I’m blaming the system because I don’t know that it can recognize and truly say strength of schedule matters, putting a team with one more loss in the loss column over a team that might have one (fewer loss),” Smart said. “Going to nine, are we going to get the reward, the bang for the buck on the strength of schedule?”
 
Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks, Smart’s boss, said we all see where the point of contention will be: A 9-3 SEC team jostling for a final CFP spot with a 10-2 team from a different conference with a perceived weaker schedule.
 
“That’s the great debate — how we are weighing a team that can have a third loss because of a ninth conference game when we could have stayed at eight,” Brooks said.
 
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said he understood why some of his coaches or athletic directors might not definitively be able to say they know what constitutes a Playoff team. It’s a murky process, and even the new metrics that the SEC pushed for (record strength and an updated schedule strength) isn’t necessarily instilling a lot of confidence in the process. The rankings each week often tend to get sorted by losses — first, all the undefeated teams, followed by the one-loss teams and so on. Rarely has the committee made the point to keep Team A with more losses ahead of Team B simply to make a point that Team A played a tougher schedule.
 
(It does happen, though. The committee kept 9-3 Alabama ahead of three two-loss teams in the final set of rankings a year ago, but the committee made that decision more of a referendum on conference championship games than schedule strength. It didn’t drop the Tide out of the field after losing an additional game those other teams did not have to play.)
 
An unspoken part of the angst? That the Big Ten has won the past three national championships, and that league is more top-heavy than the SEC is right now. SEC coaches worry that the strong middle of their league can and will cannibalize their top-tier teams (and be considered bad losses for their CFP contenders) while the Big Ten’s best make it through the regular season largely unscathed (and are rewarded for it).
 
“We saw metrics out of the College Football Playoff presentation where there's no doubt we're the strongest league,” Sankey said. “The breadth, the depth of this league — this league stands alone.”
 
SEC self-governance or a true breakaway from the rest of college sports?
 
Another hot topic here in Destin has been the idea of SEC self-governance. With so many leaders frustrated about the way the NCAA and/or College Sports Commission are governing college sports, a few prominent voices have called for the league to police itself.
 
Now, it’s not out of the ordinary for the SEC to adopt rules that only apply to its members. It wasn’t that long ago that each of the power conferences had different transfer rules, for example. Leagues are well within their rights to create restrictions or rules that their members must follow; they just cannot collude with, say, the Big Ten to make rules together because that would be illegal.
 
No one school was as vocal on the issue as Georgia; its president and head football coach have gone so far as to suggest the SEC not only govern itself but perhaps consider breaking away from the rest of college sports to do so.
 
"I've been a huge advocate that if we can't find rules that everybody plays by, then we should play our own. I'm not afraid of that,” Kirby Smart said. "I'm not afraid to break away and say that our conference is strong enough to go out and play. … If we could actually function, and it financially would make our programs more stable and we could support things financially — I'm talking about all the sports — and do by our own rules, I'd be all for that.”
 
Last week, Georgia president Jere Morehead shared a similar message with local reporters.
 
"The Georgia-Alabama SEC championship last year had ratings through the roof — imagine if that had been for the national championship?” Morehead said. “I think our fanbase is strong across the country. I think we'd have tremendous interest in a situation of that nature.”
 
Leaders elsewhere in the league wouldn’t go nearly that far. Multiple athletic directors did say they should consider rule-making that creates standards within the SEC, but they didn’t give a ton of examples of what that could look like.
 
And a few cautioned that they aren’t sure their coaches would be on board for rules that they believed put them at a disadvantage compared to their peers in other conferences. It would be hard to compete for a national championship in a certain sport if every league was operating under drastically different rules, Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin said.
 
“It’s a really draconian step,” Stricklin said. “That's a line that you're crossing, from which is probably no return. … You're unpacking a lot, though, when you go down that path. Theoretically, you could come up with rules that we all follow, the 16 of us. But we'd be living in our own little universe, and I think there's a lot of studying that needs to be done.”
 
Stricklin compared the situation to kids playing a game in their backyard. Let’s say the driveway on the left side is out of bounds, and that’s the ground rules for the game.
 
“You do that because you want everybody to understand that his is the set of rules we're playing under,” Stricklin said. “The set of rules we're under right now is very loose, very unstructured, and it's kind of every man for themselves. And we may just exist in this world for a long time, and it may be what we do.
 
“If we wanted to consider what a more structured environment looks like, you potentially could do it as a conference — but then do you want to compete with other people who don't think the driveway is out of bounds?”
 
Why the SEC hasn’t taken an official stance on the proposed 24-team CFP
 
Commissioner Greg Sankey said this week that he does not expect the SEC to determine its official position for or against a 24-team CFP until the fall. Most recently, it supported the idea of a 16-team bracket, with five designated spots for conference champions and 11 at-large teams.
 
“We have not taken any votes or positions,” Sankey said. “I said no decisions would be made (here). So, we default to where we’ve been, which is 16.”
 
The Big Ten has been pushing for a 24-team field, and in recent weeks the ACC and Big 12 have thrown their support behind the idea as well. Sankey said he and his constituents need to get more information regarding the market’s appetite for additional games, the value of such games (especially considering the loss of revenue tied to conference championship games) and also the way games would fall on the calendar.
 
“There’s no need to rush,” Sankey said, noting the Dec. 1 deadline to notify ESPN regarding changes to the format for the 2027 regular season.
 
Coaches had mixed opinions on further expansion, though they also said they are hardly unbiased observers. It’s better for coaches if more coaches make it to the CFP each year; it’s about self-preservation. And that’s why they and their bosses are so worried about leaving the decisions up to 13 people in a selection committee room.
 
“There’s a lot that we still need to determine, including a real system for how we’re going to evaluate resumes within our conferences but most importantly between our conferences, and what we’re seeing now is that’s proving to be a really difficult task for the committee — so I understand the push for 24 because it creates a bit of a margin for error,” Oklahoma athletic director Roger Denny said. “That issue certainly helps push the case for 24. But in our league, the championship game is something we’ve got to be really careful about.
 
“We can’t be flippant around that.”
 
Cupcakes get smashed
 
SEC athletic directors voted this week to have all teams play a conference game on the penultimate week of the regular season. The new scheduling mandate will take effect for the 2027 season.
 
Typically, the second-to-last Saturday of the regular season is when we’d see at least a few SEC schools playing weak opponents such as Samford and Wofford. Some pundits called it SoCon Saturday. Others preferred a different name.
 
“I think that’s the end of ‘cupcake weekend’ in late November,” Sankey said, smiling.
 
Those games allowed teams to rest starters or recover from the grind of the SEC schedule. Other leagues require their teams to play their nonconference games at the start of the season. The elimination of these games being played in November, coupled with the move to a nine-game conference schedule, should eliminate some of the criticism the SEC used to receive from coaches in other parts of the country.
 
“It’s (because of) nine conference games and a recognition that you’re populating more weekends,” Sankey said. “So, you really cannot have the odd numbers of open or nonconference dates later in the season.”

And that ends up being a win for college football fans everywhere.