The expanded college football playoffs are almost upon us, but no one seems happy

The most predictable side effect of tripling the College Football Playoff from four teams to twelve was that whining would become a varsity sport in its own right.

First up was ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, who said his league was “shocked and disappointed” that Miami fell from No. 6 to No. 12 and almost certainly out of the playoffs after the loss to Syracuse. (No mention of the fact that the Hurricanes blew a 21-point lead).

Then came Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark, who criticized the committee for ranking Boise State above both Arizona State and Iowa State because his league will only have one team in the playoff field.

“The committee continues to demonstrate that it cares about logos rather than resumes,” he said. (It doesn’t matter that the two Big 12 teams vying for an automatic bid have a combined Top 25 win.)

And then came the SEC. Danny White, Tennessee’s athletics director, presumably upset that the Vols may have to go away in the first round, said on a local radio show that a computer ranking system should replace the committee (although this has already been tried with the BCS and everyone hated it.)

Then Lane Kiffin, the Ole Miss coach whose team is almost certain to be out at 9-3, had to spill his sour grapes during the playoff party. “It’s a bad system,” he said. “Were any of these coaches (on the committee) down here in the Deep South, in these stadiums, playing in these games? How do they even know?” (One of the former coaches on the committee, Gary Pinkel, only had a little SEC experience at Missouri, but why let facts get in the way of a good rant? And besides, Lane, maybe you’ll hit me next time just Kentucky.)

So here we are, just a few days until the start of the first 12-team playoff field, and it seems like no one is happy with the monster they’ve created. To get a template for what to expect on Sunday, just refer to the 24-hour period after each NCAA basketball tournament selection show, when many people seem to have “very strong feelings” about who the final few large teams in a 68-team field should be.

With the exception of last year, when Florida State was replaced by Alabama – almost entirely due to the fact that the Seminoles’ starting quarterback was injured – we haven’t had much of it in the first decade of the four-team playoffs. Things were largely clear and the No. 5 team usually didn’t have much objection. Now that we’ve brought mediocrity into play, everyone in college sports seems to have an opinion about how unfair and bad the process is – unless, of course, it works to their advantage this time.

With that in mind, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey deserves some credit – but also a fair amount of cynicism – for how he answered a question Thursday about the sudden fear over the format.

Whether it’s fair or not, Sankey is still upset that his fellow conference commissioners (some of whom no longer work in college sports) blocked playoff expansion plans in 2021 after Texas and Oklahoma joined the SEC. So in his view, any problems with the system appear to stem from expansion plans slowing down and then speeding up again to prepare for 2024, as another round of conference expansion killed the Pac-12 and further consolidated power in its hands the Big Ten and SEC.

“We don’t want to go through changes every year,” he said. “We want to work to make things right. Now I know we are in this new era and that will raise many questions. I think the fact that we’ve lost a year of preparation and we can’t make it up means we’re going to have more of these adjustment conversations.”

He continued: “Should we provide that entry point to these conference champions with lower seeds? This has already been discussed once. I think that highlights one of the new problems.”

In other words, while Sankey admitted he would like to see eight SEC teams in the field and believes his league has enough depth to merit that consideration, his Thursday press conference did not make the number of teams a priority issue. He’s not going to waste his political capital – and he has a lot of it these days – advocating for a mediocre SEC team to beat someone else to the 12th seed.

What seems more likely as the commissioners meet again in the coming weeks to discuss the playoff format for 2026 and beyond is that the SEC will draw some red lines on seeding, which will likely put their teams at a disadvantage, as we have have seen it takes place in real time.

If you simply freeze the playoff field, as the committee decided to do this week, the SEC would have three teams play in the first round, two of which would go away: Tennessee at Ohio State and Alabama at Notre Dame. Meanwhile, presumptive champion Texas receives a first-round bye as the No. 2 seed, where it will likely face Georgia in the quarterfinals for the third time this season.

And you can see why that’s a problem pretty easily.

The original idea of the 12-team playoff was that the four first-round byes would go to the four top-seeded conference champions. This makes sense in theory and ensures that the conference championship games remain relevant until the end. But in practice it results in a parenthesis that makes little sense.

If things stay the way they are now, No. 5 Penn State would face No. 4 Boise State in the quarterfinals. And the winner of Tennessee-Ohio State, both ahead of Boise, would have to face No. 1 Oregon.

I hesitate to say that’s not fair, because this is college football, after all, and nothing has been fair in this sport in the last five decades or so. But it seems wrong that being a No. 5 seed has an easier path to the semifinals than being a No. 1 seed, or that a No. 2 seed like Texas would have a far more difficult quarterfinal game than a No. 4 seed.

In any sport that uses a tournament format to decide championships, this shouldn’t work. If Georgia had a better regular season than Arizona State and is ranked higher by the committee, it should have a more favorable path to a championship. This is a pretty easy concept to understand.

Sankey is right that constantly changing the format, like the BCS seems to do every year, is the wrong path to the CFP’s demise. This only increases anger and sows distrust in the process.

Having a human committee is not the problem here. In a sport like college football, where you only play 12 games in a season (and some of them are completely inappropriate), there isn’t enough data to put into a computer formula and be sure you get a good result. You need people to be part of the process.

The only real problem with the 12-team playoffs right now is seeding. Not Kiffin’s complaints or Yormark’s explanations. It’s simply about rewarding teams with byes they don’t deserve.

The question is whether there will be enough unity among conference commissioners to fix the problem, because — and here’s the cynical part — it will almost certainly work to the SEC’s advantage most years, while at the same time a league like that Punishing the Big 12, which is lucky enough to have one, hasn’t secured a playoff spot at all given the poor quality of play in their conference this year.

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