College Football Playoff executive updates timeline on potential format change

College Football Playoff executives have held a number of meetings in the past week in pursuit of a newly-established framework for playoff expansion, and executive director Bill Hancock on Tuesday gave an update on where the board stands.

“We are making our way through the issues,” Hancock said after Tuesday afternoon’s meeting, per Nicole Auerbach. “It is terribly complex, and this is exactly how a process like this should work.”

Hancock told reporters that the College Football Playoff Management Committee — which consists of conference commissioners — met for two hours. The meeting was originally scheduled as an in-person gathering in Chicago, but the board decided to meet via Zoom because it was not going to hold a vote. After the Management Committee met, he said, the College Football Playoff Board joined via Zoom; the board consists of college presidents and chancellors.

Speculation regarding some form of expansion has loomed for the past several months, but last week the process seemed to have been delayed. Stakeholders from Power Five conferences and group of five conferences were unable to reach any agreement on how the current four-team model should change, and while reports say that the committee has made “good progress,” the original timeline — Tuesday, Sept. 28 — seemed like a longshot.

“I never expected a rubber stamp on [today’s deadline],” Hancock said, as the committee holds more meetings on the day it hoped to make a decision. “It’s too complex.”

Hancock on Tuesday said that the College Football Playoff has three-to-four months to make major decisions on whether the Playoff might expand before the end of the current television deal, which ends after the 2025-26 season. If the committee decides to make changes after the initial contract, they have “several years” to sort it out.

The format of an expanded Playoff would be decided before the television and media rights are decided, he added.

“Media rights was one of the things they talked about,” Hancock said about Tuesday’s virtual gathering.

A myriad of College Football Playoff proposals have surfaced since expansion conversations first began to heat up. Today, Hancock told reporters that the commissioners discussed three models: the current four-team model, and eight-team model and a 12-team model.

Hancock reiterated to media that this remains a “complex” topic. One of the many complexities, he explained, is the calendar of when the Playoff games would be played, as well as how many are played. Should the College Football Playoff choose to expand, it might be complicated to fit in regular-season games, as the Playoff would have to start weeks earlier.