Greg Sankey says CFP expansion was 'clarifying point' for SEC scheduling model, offers timeline for decision

Nothing that’s currently shaping the future of college football — College Football Playoff expansion from four to 12 teams, conference expansion, new scheduling models — happens fully independently from the others. The impacts are not always direct, though, as SEC commissioner Greg Sankey explained on The Paul Finebaum Show on Friday ahead of the SEC Championship Game.

The SEC has long been considering moving to a division-less scheduling format where all the teams are in a single pool for conference championship game consideration. Sankey told Finebaum that the recent announcement from the CFP that expansion from four to 12 teams is coming for the 2024 season doesn’t have any direct impact on what decision the SEC makes, but it will indirectly alter it in the way administrators consider the change in a different postseason.

“And we wanted to know the outcome of the College Football Playoff — well really not the outcome, that’s an incorrect observation — the direction. And now we know the outcome,” Sankey said. “We just thought we’d understand the timeline for future decision making. So now we can assemble all of that information, turn the page into 2023. And without setting deadlines, it’ll be a focused part of our conversation when we start gathering up with our athletic directors in January.”

There were some other factors that spurred the SEC to wait on a scheduling model decision — Sankey had said last winter that he’d expect a decision by May of this year, which obviously did not come.

One factor was waiting to see how media rights played out and there was, of course, conference realignment. The SEC already knew it was bringing Texas and Oklahoma into the fold, but the Big 12 was looking for replacements and later the Big Ten brought in UCLA and USC.

While a single-division format is the leader in the clubhouse of all the options right now, Sankey intimated that formats with two (or more) divisions aren’t entirely on ice at this point in the process, either. Part of the reason for waiting was sorting out tiebreakers in a one-division field.

“We needed to dig further into our tiebreakers — with a focus being on a single division, we could still expand that conversation to include a divisional format, but the focus has been on a single division — and when you’re not playing everybody, we needed to make as neat and tidy the tiebreakers to determine who’s in the conference championship game,” Sankey said.

Most of all, the SEC just didn’t feel a need to rush.

“It is a clarifying point,” Sankey said of expansion. “When we were talking under the heat in Destin, I think I said to you, we were poised, in my opinion, to make a decision in late May about our future football scheduling format. But there were a handful of items where our athletic directors, our presidents and chancellors said, ‘You know what? We don’t have to rush.'”