Progress made in meeting about 2025 College Football seeding, future expansion

DALLAS — College football commissioners met with the College Football Playoff at the Grand Hyatt DFW Airport on Tuesday to discuss potential changes to 2025 seeding and further expansion into the future. The eight-hour meeting ended productively, participants said, but no decisions were made.

CFP executive director Rich Clark said discussions were productive, but more historical data was necessary to inform any decisions made to the 2025 playoff format. Further expansion and change in 2026 was also discussed briefly. Commissioners will meet again in March.

“I would say the the majority of (the meeting) was looking back at 2024-25 season,” Clark said. “Really things like ticketing, TV viewership and looking at each segment of the playoff — the on-campus games — and understanding that dynamic and how we can make that better. Our bowl games at the quarters and the semis and what we can do to take those to the next level. And then the championship game.

“As good as all those things went, there’s always, always room for improvement. We had to go back and really take a hard look at all those, so we had some pretty in-depth discussions about it all. So that was the majority of the day.”

The room for improvement, of course, pertains to how seeding went this past year and whether it’s prudent to continue to provide the four highest-ranked conference champions with the top four seeds and a first-round bye in the tournament. In order to change that in 2025, the commissioners need to vote unanimously.

Of course, conferences like the ACC and the Big 12 may be less inclined to change that for next year given the built-in advantages — both competitive and financial — gleaned from being a top-four seed, advancing to the quarterfinals automatically through the bye and the financial bonus that comes with it.

Should the CFP’s seeding just be straight seeding from the committee’s rankings? Or continue to automatically reward the four highest-ranked conference champions with the top four seeds and byes?

Before they make any changes to next year’s format, historical data is being compiled and will be analyzed so the commissioners can make a more informed decision. It’s reasonable to expect that data will be compiled in the next month so meetings in March and April can move closer toward a decision.

“Some of it is data, some of it is understanding how things happened last year and previous years so we can take a good look back and make good decisions for the future,” Clark said. “Teams are different and conferences look different. A lot of things look different. But there is still data that we can gain value from. They want to understand the implications of the decisions they’re going to make before they make them. We owe that to them.”

Clark said they’d like to have decisions made soon. The 2025 season is most pressing because it’s for next year, which is why it dominated the majority of the discussion Tuesday.

But everyone is curious about the format for 2026 and beyond. Will the CFP expand to 14 or more teams? Will the Big Ten and SEC have four automatic-qualifiers while the Big 12 and ACC secure two?

ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said the commissioners discussed 12, 14 and 16-team models. Those were preliminary discussions that will pave the way for future meetings while the focus largely remained on the 2025 format. Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark echoed those sentiments.

What would cause them to change the seeding rules for next year?

“It’s too early to determine that,” Yormark said. “We had a really good discussion. The CFP is going to run some models and then come back to us next month. You know what? Good, heart-felt discussions and everyone gave their point of view it and we’ll vet it out and see what happens.”

The models, one would assume, would indicate the ACC and Big 12 have a lower chance of getting a top-four seed than they currently have. The question is whether anything can be done to get Phillips and Yormark to come off of the current format for next season despite the protection their leagues currently have with the existing CFP model.

“We want to see the information,” Phillips said. “All of it is open for us. I think what you do is you believe in your coaches and believe in your programs. You want the best format you can possibly can for college football. We all have our own constituents, but that can’t be the only thing that drives what you do with the CFP now and into the future. It’s really important to get this thing right.

“Access is why we expanded from four to 12 and if we go to 14 or 16. None of those models were taken off. We could stay at 12 or go to 14 or 16. We just haven’t dug in exactly on which one we prefer.”