Greg Sankey walked into the SEC's annual spring meetings at a resort on the Florida Panhandle this week carrying the weight of college football's most consequential standoff. On one side: Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, who wants to blow the College Football Playoff up to 24 teams and is perfectly fine burning down conference championship games to do it. On the other: nearly every mid-major and smaller conference in the sport, desperate for access and a seat at the table. And now, in perhaps the most uncomfortable development of all — Sankey's own SEC athletic directors have told him to his face that they don't actually agree with him.
Welcome to the off-season, where college football's biggest fights don't happen between the hashes.
The Setup: Two Commissioners, One Impasse
The College Football Playoff expanded from four to twelve teams in 2024, and after decision-makers failed to reach an expansion agreement, the CFP will use the same 12-team model for the 2026 season. But nobody thinks it stays there long. The question isn't whether the CFP grows again — it's how big, who benefits, and who gets left holding the bag when the revenue math doesn't work out.
Sankey has been public and consistent: he wants sixteen teams. He's argued it's the most analytically sound expansion — enough new access to matter, not so many teams that meaningful regular-season games get diluted. He pointed to Oklahoma's late-season run last year as proof that a deeper bracket produces compelling stories. His position is rooted in data and contract realities. The SEC Championship Game alone generates roughly $100 million annually for the conference, money the conference keeps for itself rather than distributing through the CFP. No one in Sankey's building is eager to torch that revenue stream just to free up a December weekend for first-round playoff games nobody asked for.
Petitti, meanwhile, is playing a different game entirely. The Big Ten commissioner wants twenty-four teams and has been essentially holding the sport hostage to get there, stating bluntly that if the field doesn't expand to twenty-four, it should just stay at twelve. There's no fifteen. There's no sixteen. As far as the Big Ten is concerned, the menu has two options. The ACC and Big 12 have aligned themselves with the twenty-four camp as well — partly for genuine access reasons, partly because more at-large bids means their teams get in even after losing two or three conference games. According to the Big Ten's own research, eighty different programs would have qualified for the CFP since 2014 under a twenty-four-team model. Whether that's a selling point or a warning label depends heavily on your relationship with the word "exclusive."
The financial wrinkle underneath all of this is enormous. ESPN and FOX pay a combined $160–200 million to broadcast the SEC and Big Ten championship games. A twenty-four-team playoff that kicks off in December essentially makes those games meaningless warmups, and the conferences would need the CFP media rights deal to absorb that lost revenue. Nobody has figured out how that math works yet, and the CFP executives aren't scheduled to formally meet until June. So right now, the sport is in a holding pattern at a beachfront resort, debating billions of dollars in theoretical revenue while the 2026 season is already on the horizon.
The Mutiny Within: SEC ADs Break From Sankey
Here's where it gets genuinely interesting. An On3 poll of SEC athletic directors — conducted while Sankey was literally in meetings with those same people in Florida — revealed that a majority of his own conference's ADs prefer a twenty-four-team format. Eight voted for the bigger bracket. Only four sided with Sankey's sixteen-team position. One wanted twenty teams. One wanted to stay at twelve.
These aren't anonymous dissidents from mid-tier programs hoping to sneak into a playoff they'd never reach under a smaller field. These are the people running programs like Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and LSU — programs that would make a sixteen-team field almost by default most years. And they're still saying: give us more.
The rationale one SEC AD offered was candid to the point of being almost jarring: "If you don't make the CFP in the SEC, it's a failed season." It's a blunt articulation of what the conference's financial and cultural expectations have become. When your baseline is fourteen conference games, a brutal gauntlet of elite opponents, and a fan base that treats anything short of a championship run as a disappointment, the margin for error is razor thin. An AD at an SEC school watching their team lose three games and miss a sixteen-team field still has boosters demanding answers. Put twenty-four spots on the table, and suddenly a three-loss SEC team gets a first-round home game instead of a bowl nobody watches.
But another SEC AD who voted for sixteen made a point worth sitting with: "It doesn't seem like anybody wants twenty-four because they think it's best for college football. The Big Ten wants it for FOX. The ACC and Big 12 want it for more access. The SEC will eventually go to twenty-four because more teams will get in with three or four losses... but nobody really thinks it's the right thing for the sport."
That's the quiet confession at the center of this whole debate. The sport's power brokers are negotiating a television product, not a championship format. The philosophical question of what makes a college football playoff meaningful has been subordinated almost entirely to the economic question of who gets the most money and the most guaranteed inventory.
Sankey's Tightrope
To his credit, Sankey hasn't pretended the situation is clean. He acknowledged openly that he doesn't have unanimous consensus within his own league — which, given the culture of SEC solidarity, is a notable admission. He's maintained that he's not opposed to twenty-four or even twenty-eight teams in theory, but that any expansion needs to be driven by analysis and research, not pressure or speculation. He reiterated that sixteen has gained more internal traction than he expected, which reads partly as an attempt to keep his preferred number on the table and partly as honest surprise that his own ADs aren't lining up behind him.
The structural problem Sankey faces is that his leverage — the SEC's sheer dominance of the sport — actually argues against the position he's staking out. If the SEC is so good that not making the playoff is a "failed season," then SEC teams are going to get into a sixteen-team field anyway. The urgency for more spots is coming from the people who need the insurance policy, not the program that's been to almost every playoff since 2014. His ADs know this. They want the bigger bracket because it protects their programs from the one catastrophic loss that tanks a season's entire narrative, not because they genuinely fear being left out of a sixteen-team field.
Meanwhile, Petitti's hard line — twenty-four or stay at twelve — boxes Sankey in with no clean exit. If Sankey holds at sixteen and Petitti doesn't move, the format doesn't change. That means two more years of a twelve-team structure that everyone in power has already agreed isn't the endpoint. That's not a win for anyone. It's just delay dressed up as principle.
What Actually Happens Next
CFP executives are scheduled to meet in June. Between now and then, the SEC's internal temperature check — where coaches, ADs, and university presidents will all weigh in — will give Sankey a clearer read on whether he can hold his sixteen-team position or whether the internal drift toward twenty-four becomes impossible to ignore.
The SEC remains the lone power conference not yet publicly supporting expansion from twelve teams to twenty-four as early as the 2027–28 season. If Sankey moves to twenty-four, it'll be framed as an evolution based on stakeholder input. If he holds at sixteen, he'll need the rest of the power conference landscape to shift in his direction, which currently seems unlikely. And if both sides stay dug in past June, the CFP could theoretically remain at twelve into 2027 — which is somehow the most college football outcome possible. Everyone wants change, nobody can agree on what that change looks like, so nothing changes at all.
Urban Meyer has publicly called twenty-four teams "too much," and he's not wrong that the dilution argument has real merit. A model where four-loss teams get seeded and play home playoff games in November fundamentally restructures what a college football season means. The chaos and consequence that make October matchups feel like life-or-death aren't an accident — they're the product of a format where second chances are scarce. Add enough second chances and you don't get a better playoff. You get a longer regular season wearing a different hat.
But that's a philosophical objection in a fight that's being settled in boardrooms, not stadiums. The real game is money, market share, and media rights. Greg Sankey knows it. Tony Petitti knows it. And somewhere at a resort in the Florida Panhandle, eight of Sankey's own athletic directors have made it clear they know it too — and they'd like their twenty-four spots, please.
Trusted By Programs Across The Country
