The SEC spring meetings began Tuesday with relevance from Seattle to Syracuse and Tucson to Tobacco Road. In the increasingly interconnected world of college football, what happens in Destin, Florida, this week will impact everyone, everywhere.
College Football Playoff expansion is the hottest topic. The SEC favors a 16-team field while the Big Ten prefers a 24-team event, as do the ACC and Big 12. (The Group of Six conferences have not staked out an official position but favor increased access.)
Unless the SEC and Big Ten agree, the CFP will remain at 12.
"I do not anticipate any decisions," SEC commissioner Greg Sankey told reporters Monday, adding that his own membership is a house divided on 16 or 24. "I don't think we'd have a unanimous vote right now."
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey addresses the media at spring meetings in Destin, Florida, Tuesday.
The CFP management committee, which consists of the 10 FBS conference commissioners and Notre Dame's athletic director, will meet next month to discuss expansion for the umpteenth time. The SEC and Big Ten control the chessboard and face a Dec. 1 deadline to expand the field in time for the 2027 season.
People are also reading…
"What's the tipping point?" Sankey said. "Four to 12 was monumental. I think it was justifiable. You want to be careful about how far you go."
A second controversial issue on the SEC's agenda will take more time to play out but carries greater consequences for the industry than an expanded playoff: self-governance.
Will the SEC and Big Ten break away from the NCAA, leaving behind the ACC, Big 12 and Group of Six?
What seemed like a theoretical scenario months ago has become a realistic possibility following the collapse last week of the SCORE Act, a federal bill that offered limited antitrust protection, precluded athletes from being deemed employees and created national standards for NIL.
Sankey acknowledged self-governance will be discussed: "I do expect we will have conversation."
Perhaps more ominously for the industry, Georgia president Jere Morehead told reporters last week that he would be "ready to vote on creating an SEC mechanism, SEC rules ... We just cannot continue down this current path. We have waited months after months for Congress to act and it hasn't occurred yet."
What would a breakaway look like?
Would the SEC and Big Ten combine forces or operate separately?
And what would become of the other conferences?
It's complicated. Immensely complicated. But the mere fact that self-governance is being discussed on Florida's Gulf Coast — just as it was last week at the Big Ten meetings in Southern California — reflects the speed of change across college sports and the likelihood for massive disruption in the next four or five years.
As much as executives in both conferences might prefer to break away from NCAA governance, the reality carries daunting challenges.
Could the 34 schools operate together and schedule each other without becoming vulnerable to antitrust lawsuits? (That would depend, to a large degree, on whether the combined entity is seen as having monopoly power.)
Or would they be forced to exist in two distinct bubbles with only intra-conference schedules? In that case, their media partners, ESPN (SEC) and Fox (Big Ten), would assuredly demand to renegotiate contracts — presumably at lower price points.
Would the leagues left behind be willing to schedule SEC and Big Ten teams or shun them?
What about all the Olympic sports programs?
Iowa State athletic director Jaime Pollard let his feelings be known recently: "I said it three years ago, let them break away. I would turn it around and say we should break away from them. Let them go, but they have to go in all their sports and see how fun it is to play baseball and softball and track when it's just the 20 of you."
For all of Pollard's defiance, a breakaway by the SEC and Big Ten would have dire consequences for everyone else.
Without an in-season or postseason connection to the biggest brands in college football, the ACC and Big 12 would have their media rights contracts rewritten at lower valuations, as well.
There would be no true national champion.
The NCAA Tournament could be affected.
It would be bad news for everyone, on every front — the destruction of college sports as they have existed for more than a century.
But in a world where the SEC and Big Ten set their own rules, the core problem would have a path to resolution: athlete employment.
The schools in both conferences could work with their players to set compensation standards, a workable window for the transfer portal and a sensible competition calendar.
A collectively bargained agreement is the inevitable endgame, the only reasonable solution to the chaos engulfing the industry.
For now, the timing is uncertain and the mechanism unclear.
But until the athletes are declared employees and permitted to collectively bargain, nothing else really matters — not the size of the CFP field or the threats of self-governance or the dates for the transfer portal or the price of a football roster.
The mayhem will continue, unabated. In fact, it might even ... expand.
