WATCH: ACC commissioner Jim Phillips opens up on progress made toward College Football Playoff expansion

ACC commissioner Jim Phillips was the bearer of bad news back in January when he said “now is not the time” to expand the College Football Playoff. Now he is once again speaking out on the possibility.

With ACC Media Days taking place this week, Phillips made an appearance on Sirius XM radio where he further elaborated on his position. The commissioner claimed his conference is still in favor of expansion, but stands by the fact that more time was needed before moving forward.

“No,” Phillips said when asked if he had any regrets about his stance. “That’s part of it, but here’s our position from the very beginning: One, the ACC has always been very supportive of the idea of expansion. But we had done no work on the 365 day calendar for football. We’d done very little work on health and safety in the sport of football playing an additional X-amount of games. We couldn’t agree upon (automatic qualifiers), which I thought was very important.

“Conference champions should be rewarded, plain and simple. In our sports within collegiate athletics, that’s who gets a chance to go on to the tournament as well as some at-large bids. So not saying it’s only conference champions. We had issues with the Rose Bowl and some of the things they wanted. I have some things that I certainly wanted for the Orange Bowl. So we had those areas along with going through the constitution work, the transformational work.”

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Because a unanimous vote among all conferences is needed to move forward with expansion, the ACC’s reluctance put the possibility on hold. Since then, leaders have had a couple more chances to convene and discuss the expansion, as well as other topics. However, Phillips said there is still plenty of progress to be made before a conclusion is reached.

Among the topics of discussion is how large the new field should be, with some leagues preferring a 12-team model while others favoring eight.

“That stuff is starting to come along,” Phillips said. “I’m not interested in litigating what we went through before, but what I do know is we had to really good sessions back in April and June. There’s good collaboration there. We’ve started this 365-day calendar — we meaning all 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame. We’ve had several iterations. We’re putting it together. We’re addressing some of these other things and then ultimately we’ll look at what the expansion number should be. How many games, how many teams and those types of things. I am cautiously optimistic that we will get something done. Maybe even better than cautiously optimistic. I’m optimistic.”

Of note, the current CFP contract runs through the 2025 season, and at its core, the CFP is a television contract owned by ESPN. With that being the case, the earliest likely date for expansion at this point appears to be by the 2026 season. Hopefully by that time the ACC is in a position to feel comfortable moving forward with College Football Playoff expansion.