College football's first 12-team playoff is nearly set, but no one seems happy about it

The most predictable byproduct of tripling the College Football Playoff from four to 12 teams was that whining would become a varsity sport on its own.

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

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

“The committee continues to show time and time again that they’re paying attention to logos versus résumés,” he said. (Never mind that the two Big 12 teams playing for an automatic bid have one top-25 win between them.)

And then here came the SEC. Danny White, the Tennessee athletics director who is presumably miffed that the Vols might have to go on the road in the first round, said on a local radio show that a computer ranking system should replace the committee (Even though this was already tried with the BCS and everyone hated it.)

Then Lane Kiffin, the Ole Miss coach whose team is almost certainly on the outside looking in at 9-3, had to spill his sour grapes all over the playoff party. “It’s a bad system,” he said. “Have any of those coaches (on the committee) been down here in the deep South, into these stadiums and played in these games that are on this? So how do they even know?” (One of the former coaches on the committee, Gary Pinkel, had just a little bit of SEC experience at Missouri, but why let facts get in the way of a good rant? And also, Lane, maybe just beat Kentucky next time.)

So here we are, just a couple of days away from having the first 12-team playoff field set to go, and it seems like nobody’s happy with the monster they’ve created. For a template on what to expect Sunday, just refer to the 24-hour period after every NCAA basketball tournament selection show when lots of people seem to have "Very Strong Feelings" about who the last couple of at-large teams in a 68-team field should be.

Except for last year, when Florida State got replaced by Alabama – due almost exclusively to the fact that the Seminoles’ starting quarterback was injured – we didn’t have much of this in the first decade of the four-team playoff. Things were generally clear-cut, and the No. 5 team usually didn’t have much of a gripe. Now that we’ve brought mediocrity into the picture, everyone in college sports seems to have an opinion about how unfair and bad the process is – unless, of course, it works to their benefit this time.

Given that context, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey deserves some credit – but also a healthy dose of cynicism – for how he answered a question on Thursday about the sudden angst over the format.

Whether it’s fair or not, Sankey is still miffed at his conference commissioner colleagues (some of whom no longer work in college sports) for stonewalling playoff expansion plans in 2021 after Texas and Oklahoma bolted to the SEC. So in his view, it seems, any problems with the system are the result of expansion plans slowing down, then speeding up again to get ready for 2024, as another round of conference expansion killed the Pac-12 and further consolidated power in the hands of the Big Ten and SEC.

“We don't want to go through change every year,” he said. “We want to work to get things right. Now, I know that we’re in this new era and that’s going to cause a lot of questions. My perspective in having lost a year of preparation that we can’t recover means we’re going to have more of these adjustment conversations.”

He continued: “Should we be providing these lower-seeded conference champions that access point? That’s been discussed before. I think that starts to illustrate one of the new issues.”

In other words, while Sankey admitted that he’d like to see eight SEC teams in the field and believes his league has enough depth to deserve that consideration, his news conference Thursday didn’t make number of teams a front-burner issue. He isn’t going to blow his political capital – and he has a lot of it these days – going overboard to lobby for a mid-pack SEC team over somebody else to get that 12th spot.

What seems more likely when the commissioners gather again in the coming weeks to discuss the playoff format for 2026 and beyond is that the SEC is going to draw some red lines around seeding that probably puts their teams at a disadvantage, now that we’ve seen it play out in real time.

If you simply freeze the playoff field as the committee had it this week, the SEC would have three teams playing in the first round with two of them going on the road: Tennessee at Ohio State and Alabama at Notre Dame. Meanwhile, presumptive champion Texas gets a first-round bye as a No. 2 seed, where it would likely face Georgia for a third time this season in the quarterfinals.

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

The initial idea of the 12-team playoff was that the four first-round byes would go to the four highest-ranked conference champions. That makes sense in theory and keeps the conference championship games relevant until the very end. But in practice, it leads to a bracket that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

If things stay the same as they are now, the No. 5 seed, Penn State, would be lined up to play No. 4 Boise State in the quarterfinals. And the winner of Tennessee-Ohio State, both of whom are ranked above 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 in this sport has been fair for the last five decades or so. But it does seem wrong that you have an easier path to the semifinals as a No. 5 seed than 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, that’s not how it’s supposed to work. If Georgia has 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. That’s a pretty easy concept to understand.

Sankey is correct that constantly making changes to the format, as the BCS did seemingly every year, is the wrong path for the CFP to go down. That only increases the anger and sows distrust in the process.

Having a human committee isn’t the problem here. In a sport like college football where you only play 12 games in a season (and some of them are complete mismatches), there’s not enough data to put into a computer formula and feel confident that you’re getting a good result. You need people to be part of the process.

The only real issue with the 12-team playoff as it stands is the seeding. Not Kiffin’s complaints or Yormark’s declarations. It’s simply rewarding teams with byes who do not deserve them.

The question is whether there will be enough agreement among the conference commissioners to fix it because – and here’s the cynical part – it’s almost certainly going to work to the SEC’s benefit most years while penalizing a league like the Big 12 that is fortunate to have a playoff spot at all given the poor quality of play in their conference this year.

Sankey brought up that he had been in favor of re-seeding after the first round, but other commissioners wouldn’t get on board with that. Another possible fix would be to just give the top two conference champions byes into the quarterfinals and then seed the rest of the field Nos. 3-12 as the committee ranks them (with automatic bids for the Big 12, ACC and the Group of Five).

“I think we’ll look at this and probably have another one of those types of conversations,” Sankey said. “I don't want us to just react; I want us to be thoughtful in how we consider these issues.”

Will tweaking the playoff to emphasize true seeding benefit the SEC? Most years, probably so. But that would be preferable to the nonsensical mess of a bracket that the committee is going to unveil on Sunday.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: College football's expanded playoff nearly set, but no one seems happy