Greg Sankey opens up on progress with CFP expansion talks

The college football postseason picture as we currently know it could soon be changing. With speculation about College Football Playoff expansion circulating, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey talked to Paul Finebaum earlier in the week about those discussions. The talks about CFP expansion have been very productive, according to Sankey.

“We’ve been in meeting rooms regularly since June,” Sankey said on the Paul Finebaum Show. “Candid conversations, I think respect-filled conversations. But we have to go back two years, maybe three, where any number of conferences not named the Southeastern Conference were publicly calling for expansion of the College Football Playoff. So why did we have a meeting Wednesday? Well it goes back two, three years.

“We want more teams in the playoff. We’re fine with four. But I have a responsibility to work with colleagues and we identified a format that can find a balance of conference champion access and the best teams. Twelve does add teams, but you can not expand a playoff without adding games.”

Sankey on CFP expansion: We want to ‘accomplish the objective that other people asked us to’

The current CFP format has been in place since the 2014-2015 season. Many people want more teams to have an opportunity to win a national championship. The current system is fine, but there is always the debate between the final teams in the playoff and the first teams left out. That debate will continue regardless of CFP expansion, but ultimately, most people just want more opportunities to get a seat at the table.

“We bring in regions of the country that just don’t have access,” Sankey said. “The west coast has missed five of seven, probably six of eight playoff opportunities. People aren’t ready to move. So we gave each other homework assignments. Go look at bowl relationships, make sure we have clarity there.”

Part of the talks regarding CFP expansion include whether or not to have automatic bids for conference champions. Sankey said that CFP expansion could include some variation of that, but not to expect automatic bids for every conference champion.

“I think you’ll see a lot of conversations about allocating automatic bids for conference champions. I question the wisdom of that approach,” Sankey said. “That’s why in the format working group, we said the six best conference champions based on the rankings analysis rather than just assigning automatic qualifiers their status by name. And I think there’s some very good reasons for that.

“But we’ll continue talking. I think it would have been unwise for us to just say no at this point. If we’ve got a little bit of runway we ought to use it and try to see if we can accomplish the objective that other people asked us to achieve.”