Greg Sankey shuts down potential reseeding in College Football Playoff

The future of the College Football Playoff has been widely discussed throughout the offseason. This comes as expansion appears to be on the horizon, while there are also questions about the current 12-team model in the short term.

One of the public-facing figures of this move to expand the Playoff has been SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey. He recently appeared on The Dan Patrick Show. There, he addressed and shut down one idea that many have pushed, which is to reseed teams after the first round.

“Not really, reseeding,” Sankey said. “Because almost, what, a week and a half ago, for the ’25 season, the College Football Playoff management committee, which is the commissioners and the Notre Dame athletic director, agreed to just go to straight seeding by ranking. So, the movement of teams outside of the top four, into the top four, that won’t happen anymore in 2025. You’re going to get what you earn. Same for home games.”

In essence, reseeding a Playoff would take the teams who are still in the field after the opening round and re-rank them. That would be to create better matchups down the line and prevent certain teams from being rewarded for an easier path.

Last season, the Playoff model gave byes to the top four seeds. Those top four seeds were taken as the top four ranked conference champions, which gave lower-ranked teams byes. That had been a major reason for the reseeding push to begin with.

“We’ve not gone back into the reseeding question. If you go back to June of ’21, which was like ancient history in college sports when the 12-team model was introduced, and we went back through this about a month ago with everybody involved on that management committee. One of the questions was, ‘Should we be reseeding?’ We never really got back to that because, you remember, the SEC had this little expansion to 16 [teams]. Great disruption in the force. Then we had ’22 and expansion of the Big Ten. So, we waited around for a year,” Sankey said.

“Now, we’ve been in hurry-up mode ever since. We haven’t talked so much about reseeding as we did about honoring the rankings in the bracket.”

As Sankey pointed out, the College Football Playoff is now going through some rapid changes. Depending on how those changes and potential expansion work out, it’s possible that reseeding becomes a topic again soon. For now, though, there’s not likely going to be more discussion in the short term.