NEW ORLEANS — On the 23rd floor of the luxurious Windsor Court hotel, guests can view a near 360-degree panorama of this fine city — the chocolate river that winds through it, the century-old buildings of the French Quarter and the towering oaks that line the famous St. Charles Avenue.
Inside a room there Wednesday, atop this city and, perhaps, atop college athletics, leaders of the SEC and Big Ten gathered to explore some of the most significant issues in the industry.
They emerged with little decisions made except for one: They want to see a seeding change in the 2025 College Football Playoff.
The two leagues will push playoff executives to alter the seeding of the upcoming postseason, aligning the seeds based directly on the selection committee’s rankings. Such a move would eliminate the rule that grants first-round byes and the top four seeds to the four highest-ranked conference champions.
They’ll have a fight on their hands to make the change.
Any change to the 2025 playoff requires unanimity from the 10 FBS leagues and Notre Dame as it is the last year of the original television contract with ESPN.
Why would the Big 12, ACC and many of the Group of Five commissioners — the main benefactors of the rule — vote for such a move? They wouldn’t. Some of them have hinted as much in comments to Yahoo Sports last month.
“I do not have the appetite to give up any financial reward that comes with a bye,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said last month, alluding to the $8 million reward earned by a team that automatically advances into the quarterfinals.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips referred to similar professional playoff formats that use an automatic bye structure for teams that win divisions or conferences, such as the NFL.
“It’s not as if this system is so foreign,” he said. “This shouldn’t be used as a convenient rationale. It deserves a review and we should talk about how it went. But it’s not some exotic structure.”
Changes after one year of data “seem a bit quick,” Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez added, her team (Boise State) a benefactor of a bye last playoff.
The CFP Management Committee — the 10 FBS conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director — meet next week in Dallas where potential changes to the playoff format, both immediate in 2025 and long-term, are expected to be discussed.
The long-term changes are more in the news lately. Officials from the two leagues — which control playoff format decisions starting in 2026 — have been deeply exploring an expanded format that provides them as many as four automatic qualifiers each, a radical change that is expected to move the SEC closer to playing nine conference games, Yahoo Sports reported Sunday.
While no decisions were made on either of those subjects, they were discussed among leaders this week. In fact, the SEC coaches and athletic directors held a joint meeting here Monday where a nine-game conference schedule was addressed. SEC athletic directors, at their own meeting Tuesday, explored the move to nine games as well.
As Yahoo Sports reported Sunday, the league continues to move in a direction toward adopting a nine-game conference schedule in tandem with, potentially, the expansion and format change to any future postseason and striking a scheduling agreement with the Big Ten.
For years, the SEC has not been aligned on moving to nine games — a sometimes divisive issue that has festered for as many as six years. Many of the lower-resourced programs are against the move, fearing that it may impact playoff chances by introducing another loss, and they want more revenue from ESPN for playing what would likely be a highly valuable extra conference game.
“There is a lot of interest (in going to nine games),” Sankey said here Wednesday. “People change. Positions change.”
The future playoff format — which may guarantee several spots for his league — is “a piece of that dialogue,” Sankey acknowledged Wednesday.
As for that future format, Sankey and Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti declined to discuss particulars around the format starting in 2026, citing the fact that they first "owe" the other commissioners their thoughts before sharing them publicly.
However, several athletic directors who spoke to reporters on Wednesday said they believe playoff expansion is on the horizon.
“There’s got to be some tweaks. First year was good but like anything, there’s going to be some change. I think it gets expanded to give more teams an opportunity,” Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter told a group of media members in the lobby of the Windsor Court. “I think there will be expansion.”
Will it be 14 teams or 16? Discussions, as Yahoo Sports noted Sunday, have centered around a 14-team bracket with as many as 13 automatic qualifiers. But no decisions have been made, the commissioners say.
“We’ll get to what the 2026 format looks like in the future,” Sankey said.
A decision from the Big Ten and SEC, however, has been made on the 2025 playoff: They agree a change needs to be made on seeding. “We’re in favor of going to straight seeding,” Petitti said.
If that happened in this past year’s playoff, the top four seeds would have been No. 1 Oregon, No. 2 Georgia, No. 3 Texas and No. 4 Penn State. Arizona State, the 4 seed in the current format as Big 12 champions, would have been seeded 12th. Boise State, the 3 seed this year, would have been seeded 9.
The 8-9 game would have featured Boise State-Indiana, instead of Ohio State-Tennessee, for instance.
“Once the field is set, we need to discuss how it should be seeded,” Petitti told Yahoo Sports last month. “I think some of this year’s matchups and the round in which they occurred make that conversation necessary.”
Any immediate change, however, is a difficult task. The 2025 playoff exists under governance policies of the original 12-year CFP contract that began in 2014. Those policies require unanimity for format changes.
Even Sankey last week described it while on with Paul Finebaum as “tough to achieve.”
As interesting of a topic as the playoff is, SEC and Big Ten leaders spent more time this week on the implementation efforts of the House settlement's revenue-sharing concept. In fact, SEC administrators introduced particulars around the new enforcement arm to coaches on Monday — many of the same concepts that Yahoo Sports reported about earlier this month.
Sankey called the meeting with his coaches candid and productive. Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek said they were “very receptive and glad to hear how it will be implemented.”
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