The SEC and Big Ten have dug in on such wildly different visions for the future of the College Football Playoff, it's hard to predict whether one side will prevail or if a compromise on next year's format can be struck in the next couple months.
But by now, one thing should be clear to both sides: The current 12-team playoff, as well-intentioned as it might be, was designed for the college football landscape as it was before the last round of conference realignment.
In this world, though, there are some problems. And as we close in on the end of the regular season, they've emerged in a thicket of conference tiebreakers that require advanced calculus to untangle and a slew of potential 10-2 teams that seem inseparable by the CFP selection committee, including a few that may get left out altogether.
Even as someone highly skeptical of expanding the playoff beyond 12 teams, this season has exposed a format that could once again use some tweaking.
Let's start with the first big problem that has emerged this season: The 12-team playoff is really a 10-team playoff.
When this format was first publicized as a concept in the spring of 2021, there were still five somewhat balanced power conferences. Texas and Oklahoma hadn't announced their departure for the SEC. The Pac-12 still existed (in a respectable form). UCF, Houston, SMU and Cincinnati were in the American Conference. The ACC had won three of the previous eight national championships. It was a completely different world.
As a result, it made sense to incentivize conference championships. But the original idea of giving automatic bids to the six highest-ranked conference champions (five now, after the Pac-12 exodus) has revealed an unintended consequence.
This year, the Group of Five representative will probably be a team ranked in the 20s — whether it's Tulane, North Texas, Navy or perhaps James Madison out of the Sun Belt. Meanwhile, the ACC champion is likely to emerge from Virginia, Pittsburgh or SMU — none of which are going to finish in the top 12 of the rankings.
That means two spots out of 12 will go to teams that wouldn't qualify if the playoff was simply chosen by ranking. That's too many. It weakens the first-round matchups and inherently excludes teams ranked Nos. 11 and 12 whose résumés look nearly identical to No. 8, 9 and 10.
Again, just consider that 6-5 Duke is still technically alive for the ACC title. While highly unlikely given the string of results it would require this weekend, just imagine a world where the 8-5 ACC champion Blue Devils get into the playoff while 10-2 Miami — the highest-ranked ACC team – gets left out. Not to mention bubble teams like BYU, Utah and Vanderbilt, all of which had much better seasons and would be more likely to compete in a playoff game.
Yes, in that scenario Duke would be the champion of a power conference, but only because unbalanced schedules and quirky tiebreakers got them to the ACC title game in the first place.
Which brings us to the next point.
Over the last several years of the four-team playoff, conferences decided that divisions were hurting their playoff chances more than helping, not to mention the series of duds you'd often get in the Big Ten. (Remember that Michigan-Purdue game a few years ago? Yeah, nobody else does either.) Or when there were SEC seasons where one division was appreciably stronger than the other.
In theory, it made sense to go No. 1 vs. No. 2 with no divisions, as the Big 12 had always done it.
But the Big 12, at the time, was a 10-team league playing a full round-robin schedule. All the other conferences followed suit at the exact moment they became bloated through realignment madness.
It hasn't worked.
Just consider this year in the SEC. Texas A&M is 11-0 and an excellent team, but to this point the Aggies have played Auburn (5-6), Mississippi State (5-6), Florida (3-8), Arkansas (2-9), LSU (7-4), Missouri (7-4) and South Carolina (4-7), with their one big marquee game to come Friday at Texas. In other words, Texas A&M has dodged Georgia, Ole Miss, Alabama and Oklahoma.
Georgia, by contrast, played Tennessee, Alabama, Ole Miss and Texas. It's not Texas A&M's fault, but there is simply no equity between those two schedules.
And because there are so many teams playing vastly different schedules even within a league, it appears three of the four power conferences will need to employ complicated tiebreakers to determine who plays next weekend. (It's more straightforward in the Big Ten, unless either Ohio State loses to Michigan or Indiana loses to Purdue.)
Sure, it's kind of cool that 8-3 Arizona State is still alive for the Big 12 championship game via all these tiebreakers, adding significant meaning to its rivalry game against Arizona. But wouldn't it also feel a little bit like a random results generator and not reflective of the season we just watched in the Big 12 where Arizona State was the fourth-best team in the league this year?
That leads into yet another discussion: Unless you're a team like the Sun Devils, which only has one path to the playoff, how many of these teams evenwantto play in the conference championship game?
If you've gotten to the end of the regular season and you're a lock to the make the playoff, what's the benefit? Yes, there's potentially a first-round bye at stake. But last year, all four teams that got byes lost in the quarterfinals. Perhaps there's something to the idea you're better off sharpening up in the first round.
Also, consider this: Say Alabama makes the SEC title game and loses to finish 10-3. The selection committee would not want to disqualify the Crimson Tide based on a game other teams didn't have to play, just like SMU last year. But if that's how it plays out, there will undoubtedly be howling if a 10-2 team gets snubbed.
Overall, the 12-team playoff has been a net positive for the sport. This week alone, we have 17 games that could directly impact the field. That's a phenomenal change from even the four-team playoff where it felt like only a few games mattered at the end of the season.
But the combination of conference realignment and getting rid of divisions has turned a brilliantly crafted 12-team playoff into something that needs a little more work to fit college football's current paradigm. Whether that means further expansion, changing certain criteria or conferences agreeing to get rid of their championship games will be for them to decide in the coming weeks, months and years.
The SEC's vision of a 16-team playoff with five automatic qualifiers and the Big Ten's idea of a 24-team tournament with multiple automatic bids per power conference are not compatible.
If they can simply agree that the aforementioned problems need to be addressed, some kind of solution should be in sight.