Heather Dinich dishes on why compromise is vital to ongoing College Football Playoff proposals

The 12-team College Football Playoff hasn’t even taken a test drive yet and already leaders in the sport are reportedly considering another playoff expansion to 14 teams.

There are a number of reasons behind that push, but the primary driver is the sports’ TV agreement for the playoff.

“College Football Playoff leaders are still going down this road in large part because they’re trying to get the TV deal done and they’re doing it at a time when these leagues have grown,” ESPN’s Heather Dinich said Thursday on the Paul Finebaum Show. “Period. I think it’s that simple.

“So you have conferences saying, ‘We’re bigger, we’re better, we would like to have more money and more representation in the College Football Playoff because of that.’ Is that fair? Depends on who you ask.”

The number of automatic qualifiers for the College Football Playoff is another major consideration, particularly with the Big Ten ballooning to 18 teams and the SEC expanding to 16.

As things currently stand in a 12-team format, there are only five automatic qualifier spots, one for each power conference champion and one for the highest-rated Group of Five champion. The other seven spots go to at-large teams.

The push for more automatic qualifiers, particularly weighted toward certain conferences, may not go over well with everyone.

“So I think that’s exactly why they are where they’re at as they try to figure this out,” Dinich said. “But there have to be compromises. There have always been compromises.”

The ESPN analyst, who has extensively covered the College Football Playoff over the last decade, opened up on one such example of compromise within the current system.

“When you look at, people are surprised that Notre Dame, which could be the No. 1 team in the country, in a 12-team playoff can never get a first-round bye,” Dinich said. “But people also forget that Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick was one of the four original authors of this 12-team proposal and is OK with that. And they’re OK with hosting a first-round home game and having to win four straight games to win a national title. So everyone, along the way, has had to concede something.”

Time will tell how quickly talks of potential expansion to a 14-team College Football Playoff field progress to action, but this much is clear. The sport remains in flux.

Something seems bound to change, it’s just a matter of how.

“The question is how much will they concede moving forward in this, whatever this looks like,” Dinich said. “Is it revenue? Is it a weighted percentage of the voting? Because right now that’s not even and it never has been in the room. Right now when they’re voting on things that don’t have to be unanimous, a majority of those Power Five commissioners carry the weight within the room. How much more of that will tilt toward the Big Ten and the SEC?

“So there are always concessions made along the way, I think the question now is how much more does it lean toward the Big Ten and the SEC because of the leverage they have.”