- - When SEC and Big Ten disagree, the College Football Playoff wins

Blake Toppmeyer, USA TODAYNovember 11, 2025 at 4:09 AM

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When SEC and Big Ten disagree, the College Football Playoff wins

Deadlines become most influential and effective when something threatening lurks on the other side of the date.

Forget to file your taxes on time? That comes with an IRS fine.

Miss the open enrollment deadline? That torpedoes your chance to make insurance changes.

And what if the SEC and Big Ten miss the Dec. 1 deadline to modify and expand the College Football Playoff for the 2026 season? Well, nothing bad happens. A 12-team playoff format that’s working just fine would continue next season.

Sounds pretty good. Certainly, it’s not a threat. Let the deadline come and go with no action.

The 12-team playoff isn’t broken. It doesn’t require a fix.

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The playoff definitely doesn’t need Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti doing the fixing. In the offseason, Petitti became transfixed with the idea of a 16-team playoff with play-in games and multiple automatic bids for each Power Four conference.

As Petitti's obsession with play-in games deepened, I thought he must either be an unserious person, or he’s conducting a psyop. Or, he’s an unserious person conducting a psyop.

Because, if there’s one thing college football needs, it’s a play-in game involving the Big Ten’s sixth-place team. (I typed that in my sarcastic voice, can you tell?)

We just had that play-in game. We called it Oregon 18, Iowa 16, on Nov. 8. The regular season supplies the play-in games.

But, wait. Maybe, there’s hope for sixth-place Iowa yet. Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger recently reported Big Ten stakeholders have mulled a mega playoff with 20-plus teams and littered with auto bids.

That dog won’t hunt in the South.

“I'm not a big fan of automatic qualifiers,” Mississippi State President Mark Keenum said recently on “The Paul Finebaum Show.”

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Keenum, giving voice to the SEC’s position, favors a 16-team playoff, but with 11 at-large bids selected by the playoff committee.

If you’re wondering why I’m quoting Mississippi State’s president, he’s the chairman of the CFP’s board of managers, and he’s the SEC’s representative to the group. That makes him a notable voice on playoff expansion talks.

“I think the best teams ought to play in (the playoff) … and not have automatic bids,” Keenum told Finebaum. “That's the position of the Southeastern Conference presidents and chancellors (and) our commissioner.”

To review, the Big Ten would like a bigger playoff with a bevy of automatic bids. The SEC doesn’t like automatic bids, nor does it benefit from them. Three weeks from the deadline, the conferences are miles apart. Playoff expansion cannot occur unless the Big Ten and SEC agree on a new format.

“I'll be honest, I'm not very optimistic that we'll” reach an agreement on CFP expansion before the deadline, “but we'll keep working on it,” Keenum said.

Don’t bother. Let’s pretend the deadline was Nov. 1, and, with no consensus reached, continue with this 12-team format in perpetuity.

12-team College Football Playoff strikes right balance

By my count, 30 teams remain in playoff contention entering this third Saturday in November. That includes nearly two dozen teams from power conferences.

That’s enough contenders to keep the schedule full of impactful games each weekend, without devaluing results.

The Oregon-Iowa result mattered greatly. In the Petitti plan, that game would have been a glorified exhibition before the teams meet again in a December play-in game.

This weekend, Texas and Oklahoma will play SEC road games with their playoff fates hanging in the balance. Southern California will try to keep its hopes alive against Iowa. Notre Dame must sidestep surging Pittsburgh.

Playoff stakeholders tweaked the seeding structure for the 12-team format this past offseason. No longer are first-round byes exclusive to conference champions. Instead, teams ranked Nos. 1 through 4 will receive byes, no matter whether they won their conference.

Initially, I thought that seeding adjustment might be a premature reaction, but with the ACC caving in on itself, I’ll admit it was a worthy change to stop having byes exclusive to conference champions.

With that seeding kink ironed out, this fine-tuned 12-team structure can really shine.

The committee will have to make a difficult decision or two come selection Sunday, but the season results will sort most of it out. If the playoff expands, the field would become messier. That's not necessary.

I count six teams as serious national championship contenders. No team that could win it all will be snubbed from a 12-team bracket.

At 12, the playoff remains exclusive, but accessible.

This playoff format works. Let the CFP expansion deadline pass. Ride with 12.

Blake Toppmeyer is USA TODAY's senior national college football columnist. Email him at [email protected] and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.

When are the College Football Playoff rankings released?

This week's top 25 comes out 7 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 10 on ESPN.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: CFP wins when SEC and Big 10 can't agree

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