College Football Playoff Resolution Even Further Away After Latest Reset

In the past two decades, as college football evolved from a regional sport into a national one, one has to admire conference commissioners for their propensity to explore the country in style.

In between shuffling in and out of various conference rooms to debate the future of this ever-growing endeavor, they’ve taken in the scenic mountain vistas of Park City, Utah, hunkered down at the historic Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colo., and reveled in thick humidity at several luxury resorts a stone’s throw from South Beach in Miami. This week, the traveling roadshow made its latest stop to discuss the future of the College Football Playoff in a fairly new locale near the Blue Ridge Mountains.

While these trips include plenty of meaningful discussions, ultimate progress has unfortunately been best left to be measured using a sundial and not a stopwatch.

Time after time, the commissioners have met attempting to figure out the next iteration of the playoff. Time after time, we’ve heard flowery quotes about progress and consensus.

Yet, for all of the hours of meetings the past few years, all we’ve gotten is approximately nowhere in this whole process. Between the first go-around of CFP expansion to 12 teams, to the current impasse surrounding the format in 2026 and beyond, it’s like the commissioners who cried wolf—only in this case involving false starts and midfield punts surrounding a postseason tournament that should have been agreed upon ages ago.

A source familiar with the discussions this week in Asheville, N.C., characterized them as a reset to Sports Illustrated. Such a sentiment should be alarming by now, as we’re all further away from a CFP solution with the impending arrival of the season and not closer like everybody claimed we would be.

While there was once some momentum around the SEC and Big Ten deciding upon a new 16-team bracket involving a set number of automatic qualifiers for each power conference for next year’s postseason, that hit a snag. You can date this back to the SEC spring meetings in May, where coaches rallied around a CFP that features five automatic qualifiers and 11 at-large spots, a mantle quickly taken up by the ACC and Big 12 not long after.

“I wouldn’t say there’s a leading contender right now for them, but they’re taking a good look and a fresh look at it,” CFP executive director Rich Clark said Wednesday afternoon, according to reporters present. “The format could be a lot different in ’26, or it may be the same.”

In other words, back to square one we go after months of vacillating between a slew of 14-team brackets of assorted makeup and a 16-teamer, which gathered momentum over the last six weeks.

Sticking with a 12-team format has always been an option and was once preferable not long ago, including by broadcast partner ESPN. But the fact that it’s being dusted off in the middle of June only further underscores that the process has fully gotten off the rails.

Nobody can agree on anything. This latest holdup will only further muddy the waters in a sport which has never shied away from an argument, but suddenly finds itself stuck in the midst of too many such back-and-forths right now. Will the Big Ten move off its line in the sand on multiple bids and automatic qualifiers? Will the SEC stand tall and try to push a format that would likely favor its league above all others over the long term, now that it has a few wingmen to help support it?

At this point, it’s anyone’s guess, even potential tweaks to the criteria the selection committee must look at being an interesting bit of movement in contrast to the retrenchment everywhere else.

The underlying problem for the commissioners, however, is that the constant bickering and headline-generating comments only further erode the very thing the playoff was created to do.

Fifteen years ago, when the CFP was still an idea, one of the biggest pushes for reform from the BCS model had nothing to do with questions of access or what was right in terms of determining a national champion. Rather, it was part of a greater push to further entrench college football as a more national sport, one where those in the Deep South would be drawn into watching “Pac-12 After Dark,” given the impact it could have on their own teams’ postseason future.

“It will be much like the Super Bowl,” former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said at the time of the creation of the four-team playoff. “You’ll be dealing with civic communities, and I think it’ll be a national process, and people have to be very energetic about it. I think it’s going to be great for the sport.”

In some ways, it has been. The money has certainly been flowing into an ever-larger degree for schools and their conferences. The ratings have fluctuated for the CFP games, but regular-season interest has generally pointed upward in the past decade. The oft-derided rankings release show every Tuesday still fires up fan bases to yell into the void each fall. Recent history suggests we’re seeing a slight uptick in monster home-and-home series becoming a part of the fabric of the season with an eye toward impressing the committee.

By kicking the can down the road yet again on the playoff format, the commissioners in charge are liable to erode what little trust they had among the general public even further. Those casual fans the CFP is designed to appeal to probably haven’t been following along too closely to every twist and turn in this saga, but none will take too kindly to the confusion more change is all but certain to bring. Worst case, they may even tune it out altogether, especially if the NFL Goliath keeps refusing to give ground to its junior counterpart.

A cursory glance at Google Trends shows a spike nearly every year in early December in searches for How does the College Football Playoff work? Given the latest machinations, even those inside the industry may need to do the same to keep everything straight.

It shouldn’t be that hard to come to grips with a system of compromise on the future of the playoff that gives everybody a little of what they want, yet still leaves them yearning for more.

Based on past precedent, though, seeing the forest through the trees when it comes to the future of college football’s marquee event is difficult, even if you’re sitting high on a hill doing just that as the commissioners were this week in western North Carolina.

Thankfully, for them at least, there’s always another resort down the road to do it all again in a few weeks to come to the same conclusion.