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Michael Wilbon blasts Big Ten, SEC pushing for autobids to College Football Playoff: 'I find it loathsome'

Chandler Vesselsby:Chandler Vessels•02/19/25•

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michael wilbon
Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

Michael Wilbon might surprise some people with his take on the SEC and Big Ten pushing for automatic bids to the College Football Playoff. A recent report from Ross Dellenger of Yahoo! Sports indicated that momentum is building to expand the CFP to either 14 or 16 teams, but many have expressed disdain for how they proposed to make up that field.

If that expansion happens, leaders from both the SEC and Big Ten have indicated they would like to have four automatic bids from each conference. They would also give two automatic bids each to the Big 12 and ACC and one to the highest ranked Group of 5 champion.

That would leave either only one or three more at-large bids up for grabs for the rest of the country. Wilbon, who is both commentator for ESPN and a trustee at Northwestern, spoke out on this during Wednesday’s episode of Pardon the Interruption.

Although his position at Northwestern — his alma mater — means his conference would benefit from the newly proposed Playoff format, he still has major issues with the message that it sends to the rest of the country.

“It leads toward the ruination of what I appreciate about college football,” Wilbon said Wednesday on PTI. “Having followed it all my life and covered it half my life, I hate what this is doing. And yes, I’m a trustee at a university in one of those conferences that is at the big kids table, the golden child table, to be in the Big Ten or SEC, and I’m grateful for that. But now, I’m sure I’m going to make people who deal with me in the Big Ten cringe. I don’t like exclusion when it comes to sports. I want inclusion.

“When you cut out fan bases, you cut out regions of the country, not just conferences. You can absorb those teams under another umbrella. I get that. USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon can be in the Big Ten and you sort of don’t exclude, but you do exclude. You exclude rivalries. You eliminate them. You chop down, when you do this, a big part of what college football really is and I find it loathsome. So I’m not going to deal with whether it’s deserved. It distracts, in a major way, from college football to me.”

This past season was the first year in which the College Football Playoff expanded from four teams to 12. The Big Ten led all conferences with four schools to make the field, while the SEC was right behind it with three.

The difference is that only one of those bids was automatic, with the champions from each league getting those. It might very well be that the conferences deserved that many teams this time around, but that might not always be the case.

However, according to the report from Dellenger, there might not be anything that can be done to stop this. The other 10 FBS leagues and Notre Dame have already signed a “memorandum of understanding” that gives the Big Ten and SEC sole discretion on the future of the CFP format beginning in 2026.

Wilbon is not the only sports commentator to push back on the proposal. ESPN’s Rece Davis, who is one of the hosts for the College Football Playoff Rankings show, also said that he is “not a fan.”

Regardless of the perception though, the Big Ten and SEC may very well do what they want. The only reason they got the other conferences to give them control of the CFP format was by threatening to break away and form their own postseason, so they’ve sent a clear message in the past.

We’ll have to wait and see how it plays out, but at least one trustee in those conferences has made it known he is not on board.