SEC, Big Ten leaders mulling future of fast-changing college sports

Tony Petitti

The Big Ten and SEC already have the upper hand in college football. At meetings, their leaders are setting the stage to exact even more control over the sport’s future.

Among the talking points when an advisory group made of members from the conferences meets in Nashville, Tennessee, are the future of the expanded college football playoff and a possible scheduling agreement between the two conferences that would indirectly make it harder for the rest of college football to compete for the 12 or possibly 14 spots available in the postseason.

No final decisions are expected this week, though the discussions are expected to be a jumping-off point for more definitive moves to come. Here’s a look at some of the topics:

Future of the College Football Playoff

The new 12-team playoff makes its debut this season. The top five conference winners, as ranked in the College Football Playoff committee’s selection poll on Dec. 8, will earn spots in the postseason, followed by the next seven highest-rated teams.

It’s likely that two teams will be added to the format beginning in 2026, which is also when the six-year, $7.8 billion contract to televise the playoffs begin. Big Ten and SEC leaders have made proposals to get three or four automatic spots in the new playoff. Neither idea has been popular among the rest of the conferences, but the SEC and Big Ten have negotiated to have more control over what comes next.

In possibly the most simple-to-digest sign of the power these two conference wield — they have 15 teams in this week’s AP Top 25.

A new scheduling format

Connected to the playoff format is a possible change in scheduling that would add an interconference Big Ten-SEC game to each team’s schedule.

Part of what the conferences would like to achieve with the new postseason format and more automatic bids would be to eliminate the influence of the selection committee, whose poll doles out at-large berths.

To whatever extent the subjective poll remains part of the…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/sec-big-ten-leaders-mulling-211836138.html

Author : NBC Sports

Publish date : 2024-10-08 21:18:36

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.