SEC Commissioner: CFP Format Needs to Be Reconsidered Amid Conference Realignment

More change may be coming to the 12-team College Football Playoff model before it makes its debut in 2024.

Greg Sankey, the Commissioner of the Southeastern Conference and an overseer of the CFP, said that the conference realignment that has been rampant over the past several weeks necessitates a reaction with the agreed-upon model for the postseason tournament.

"The circumstances have changed, and we need to reconsider the format," Sankey said, per Chris Low of ESPN.com. "I'm not convinced we need to reconsider the number of teams, and I've been clear that I would have been OK with an eight-team playoff with no conference champion access. That wasn't, if you will, politically tenable within the group. So as we continued to look at the models, we came up with the six-and-six model. But, again, the circumstances have changed in a meaningful way, and my inclination is we need to reexamine the current format."

Sankey also said that everyone has to be "prepared to deal with change" and that the conference would have been okay with the CFP remaining at four teams but that the interest of one conference should not trump the interest of growing the game.

The current model set to debut in 2024 suits what the 2023 college football landscape will look like. That means that the six highest-ranked conference champions would receive an automatic bid and the six highest ranked team's without a conference championship would make up the remainder of the field.

With the Pac-12 shrinking to four teams in 2024, the power status of that conference is much weaker. It also comes as the Big-10, SEC and Big-12 all will add strong teams to their conferences, making the schedules for their top teams even more difficult than they already are.

The current model has the top four teams qualifying for the playoff, and the SEC is the only conference to have had a participant in every iteration of the event since its inception in 2014.

That format will still be used for the 2023 season and the FBS commissioners have meetings scheduled for next week in Dallas and in Chicago in September where this topic could be discussed.