Why Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick still wants a 12-team College Football Playoff field
Notre Dame athletics director Jack Swarbrick thought College Football Playoff expansion chatter would be over by now. He played a crucial role in nearly ending it last summer, after all.
Swarbrick was one of four playoff management committee members who designed and proposed a 12-team format last June. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, then-Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby and Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson crafted it with him. Their proposal included automatic bids for the six highest-ranked conference champions and six at-large spots.
In that model, the top four seeds earned first-round byes. Those spots were reserved for conference champions, meaning Notre Dame’s best possible seeding in the model was fifth. Swarbrick was content to make that compromise because the Irish don’t play a 13th game prior to the playoff.
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“I couldn’t have been more vested in the model of 12 that we came forward with,” Swarbrick said Aug. 10 in a live Q&A hosted by Notre Dame. “We spent 18 months on that plan.”
Swarbrick, Sankey, Thompson and Bowlsby presented that model in June 2021. Official approval felt like a formality at that point.
About a month later, though, the SEC’s swipe of Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12 killed momentum. Expansion was formally tabled in January. The playoff is expected to stay at four teams through 2025, when its contract with ESPN runs out. But expansion after that feels inevitable. And Swarbrick will continue to push for 12 teams, even if some of the specifics such as autobids are different than before.
“I think it’s the right number for a host of reasons,” Swarbrick said. “The calendar is so tough to accommodate. You get bigger than 12, the calendar gets even more complicated. Less than 12, you’re not giving enough student-athletes the opportunity.”
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Access is a core part of his preference. Not just access for more teams, but more players. Swarbrick wants to change the disproportionate percentage of FBS football players who get a chance to play for the title and bring it closer to that of other sports.
“The most compelling statistic for me when we started our research was on average, if you’re a college athlete, you have a 23 percent chance of participating in the postseason,” Swarbrick said. “If you’re a football player, you have a less than 4 percent chance. We need to give student-athletes – if you’re a football player – more opportunity to be in the postseason.”
By postseason, Swarbrick is referring to the championship bracket. More than half of the 131 FBS teams play in bowl games each year, which are part of the postseason. All but two of those bowls each year, though, have no championship stakes. He wants more bowls with title implications each year and more players to experience them.
A twelve-team format with at least six at-large bids does, of course, also help Notre Dame’s championship access as an independent. Notre Dame wants to remain independent as long as it remains a feasible position, and playoff access is one of the driving factors in the independence calculus.
Any realistic 12-team format would likely give the Irish a championship path that fuels independence’s viability. So would a 16-team field, which has reportedly been informally discussed among conference commissioners and athletic directors.
