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Friedlander: The SEC and B1G want to monopolize the Playoff. Can the ACC stop them?
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It’s Halloween, but you have plans and won’t be home. You don’t want the neighborhood kids to go empty-handed. So you find the biggest mixing bowl in the pantry, fill it with candy and leave it on the front porch with a note saying “Take only 1, please!”
It’s a great idea in theory. Not so much in practice.
Because inevitably there will be one greedy kid, usually accompanied by a loyal toady, who fills up his bag leaving only a few unwanted Almond Joys for everyone else to fight over.
That, in simplistic terms, is what the SEC and Big Ten have in mind once the College Football Playoff’s current television contract expires and they get to go Trick or Treating for a new deal.
According to published reports, representatives from the 2 conferences will meet next week in Nashville to discuss a range of topics related to the continuing goal of turning college football into their own private fiefdom.
Among the topics on the agenda is a plan to scoop up most of the candy in the bowl – or in this case the even further expanded Playoff – by granting the SEC and Big Ten 4 automatic spots each in a proposed 14-team bracket while leaving everyone else to fight over the scraps that are left.
A note on our story from last Thursday on the SEC-Big Ten joint meeting: There was already a proposal from the leagues in the spring for those conferences to each have three or four AQs into the CFP.
It is expected, as written below, to be a big discussion topic in Nashville: https://t.co/Q8VoQIVwwm
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) September 30, 2024
It’s a power play that has a good chance of succeeding thanks to the concessions the ACC, Notre Dame and other conferences made last spring in order to get the Playoff expanded to its current 12-team format.
The agreement gave the SEC and Big Ten a significantly larger share of the $7.8 billion generated from the ESPN contract that runs through 2032. It also ceded greater control to the 2 dominant leagues over decisions involving the Playoff’s future direction.
But not total control.
Which is why the ACC and its recently galvanized commissioner Jim Phillips must start using whatever leverage it has left to push back on any proposal that would further diminish its place on the football food chain.
Starting now, before it’s too late.
The question is, what can be done?
As we’ve all been told, money talks and everything else walks. And the SEC and Big Ten have combined to accumulate a lot more of it than everybody else in college athletics.
But it’s also true that there’s strength in numbers. So if the ACC is willing to do everything it takes to keep its seat at the adults’ table, it can’t go it alone.
The conference already has at least one powerful ally in Notre Dame, an entity that still holds considerable clout among the television networks even though its recent performance on the field hasn’t lived up to its name or tradition.
That’s a good start.
The next step is creating a voice loud enough to be heard over the din of the SEC/Big Ten conglomerate. That means enlisting the Big 12 and the Group of 5 conferences to join the cause and forming a mutually beneficial alliance of their own.
Not the kind of alliance the Big Ten used as a smokescreen to dupe the ACC and the dearly departed Pac-12 into a false sense of security before carrying out its West Coast expansion plan. We’re talking about an actual partnership in which everyone involved is invested in accomplishing a common goal.
Before that can happen, the ACC and Big 12 need to stop bickering over who’s the nation’s 3rd best conference and plotting to poach each other’s most valuable properties and realize that the only way either is going to survive long-term is to learn how to work and play nice together.
Cooperating won’t stop the SEC and Big Ten from dominating the negotiations when the Playoff format is revisited in 2026. But with the added juice of Notre Dame and the numbers of the G5, it can at least prevent the ACC and Big 12 from making any more concessions just to remain on the fringes of relevance.
There’s a chance the proposal to give the SEC and Big Ten 4 automatic bids is little more than a bluff designed to force the other conferences into agreeing to a previously announced 14-team plan they’ve already rejected. One that would give the 2 power brokers 3 spots each, with the Big 12 and ACC getting 2 apiece to go along with 1 for the top G5 team and 3 at-large selections.
But it’s a risky bluff to call.
It’s anybody’s guess why the SEC and Big Ten are so adamant about ensuring so many of their teams get into the Playoff every year. If they’re as dominant as they say they are and that much better than anybody else, they shouldn’t need automatic bids to get 4 or more teams into the field.
They should be able to do it on their own merits.
Then again, some kids just feel the need to take as much candy as they can out of the bowl. Even if it means leaving little or nothing for everybody else.
Award-winning columnist Brett Friedlander has covered the ACC and college basketball since the 1980s.
