It took one staging of the 12-team College Football Playoff to produce a very concerning consequence.
The hesitancy to schedule marquee nonconference matchups moving forward.
"There is more of a feeling now that regular-season scheduling is governed by the College Football Playoff selection," Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey said in a news conference as the league's spring meetings commenced in Destin, Florida. "You can drop a big series, and it's not going to hurt you come selection time. You had a team that played four games against teams with 6-6 records last year that got in, and you had a team that really didn't play anybody at the top of its conference get selected in.
"It's clear that not losing becomes in many ways more important than beating the University of Georgia, which two of our teams that were left out did. Nobody had that kind of quality win. We can go through the analytics and show that our schedule is different from anyone else's, period."
Since the inaugural 12-team tournament ended in January with eighth-seeded Ohio State knocking off seventh-seeded Notre Dame 34-23, Nebraska has canceled a home-and-home series during the 2026-27 seasons with Tennessee, while Southern California is considering moving on from its annual rivalry with Notre Dame after this season due to the demands of its nine-game Big Ten schedule.
Nebraska is also in the Big Ten and chose to replace the Volunteers with Bowling Green in 2026 and Miami of Ohio in 2027.
"Strength of schedule isn't everything, but it is an important factor," Sankey said. "If you play the top-ranked team and the 130th-ranked team, those two games average out to 65.5. If you play 65 and 66, they average out to 65.5. You're just as well playing 65 and 66, but the problem is that, except for one or maybe two teams, we don't have a 65 or 66 in our conference, and everybody else has a group at 60 and below.
"That has to be considered by us in making our schedule and by the CFP itself in evaluating selection criteria."
Indiana and SMU were the two playoff teams Sankey referenced for getting in over Alabama and Ole Miss, which each sustained three league losses. The Crimson Tide lost their next-to-last game of the regular season 24-3 against an Oklahoma team that finished 6-7, while the Rebels lost a September home game to a Kentucky team that would have been winless in SEC play otherwise.
The SEC has clearly been college football's dominant conference of the past generation, with five different programs -- Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia and LSU -- winning 13 of the 17 national championships during the 2006-22 seasons. The Big Ten has claimed the past two with Michigan in 2023 and Ohio State last year, and the SEC was just 2-3 in last season's playoff, with Tennessee, Georgia and Texas each getting eliminated by double-digit margins.
"It absolutely blows my mind how the SEC can end up with 13 or 14 teams in the NCAA basketball, softball and baseball tournaments," Georgia coach Kirby Smart said. "They are larger pools, but you look at what they're able to do, and there is no outcry or nobody beating a drum saying it's completely unfair.
"They do a lot of things based on RPI and strength of schedule, and they reward teams for that. I just have a hard time seeing Ole Miss, Alabama and South Carolina not being among the best teams last year."
The first full Saturday of the 2025 season contains the intriguing showdowns of Texas at Ohio State, Alabama at Florida State and LSU at Clemson. Within the next decade, both Alabama and Georgia have a home-and-home series scheduled with Ohio State.
Only time will tell if such pairings will be in abundance down the road or whether the College Football Playoff will annually lessen the sport's regular-season scheduling desires.
"We're playing 10 Power Four games this season with Florida State and Wisconsin on top of our eight league games," Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer said. "I know we haven't held back at this point on anything when it comes to playing a tough schedule nonconference-wise."
Said Sankey: "It's good for college football to have these kinds of games. I generally think people believe that way, but you've seen the dominance of CFP access becoming such a big deal. Preserving these kinds of games is a big problem we're encountering now."
Playoff formats
The College Football Playoff is expected to expand from 12 to 16 teams way sooner than later, and the Atlantic Coast Conference and Big 12 Conference recently supported a model that would call for five automatic qualifiers and 11 at-large berths.
Another proposal that has been discussed would be way more fixed, with the SEC and Big Ten guaranteed four spots apiece, the ACC and Big 12 two each, and one for the highest-ranked Group of Five conference champ. That would leave room for three at-large selections from any of those leagues.
Sankey does not expect any kind of vote this week.
"I think it is incorrect to simply focus on the College Football Playoff at this moment," he said. "We've been talking about football scheduling within our league."
No apologizing
Even though the SEC had a disappointing 2024 football season by its recent standards, the league set records by landing 14 teams in the men's basketball tournament and 13 teams in the baseball tournament that begins Friday. The league also had 14 of its 15 softball-playing members invited to the NCAA tournament, with the SEC producing five of the eight teams that have advanced to the Women's College World Series in Oklahoma City, which begins Thursday.
"We don't apologize here," Sankey said. "I'm proud we have 13 teams in baseball, and I wish we had 14."
Odds and ends
Sankey said the league this week could look at a permanent home for its softball tournament. ... Smart on whether we will see fewer undefeated national champions in the years ahead: "I would say, 'Yes,' and it's not because of the schedule and the length of the schedule. It would be because of the transfer portal and the lack of depth." ... DeBoer on his second year: "We're in a good spot right now, because we've kind of really found out who wants to be here."
Contact David Paschall at [email protected].