Eliminating the CFP’s rule designating the top four seeds and first-round byes to conference champions won’t likely change next year.
ATLANTA — A seeding structure change to the College Football Playoff format is unlikely to gain the necessary support without compromise, multiple commissioners told Yahoo Sports this week.
Eliminating the format’s rule designating the top four seeds — and first-round byes — only to conference champions has been discussed as a possible shift after the first year of the playoff, as Yahoo Sports reported in early December. However, unanimity among the 11 members of the CFP Management Committee — the 10 FBS commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director — is required to make any format changes in time for the 2025 playoff.
Commissioners of the Big 12 and Mountain West — the chief benefactors of the bye rule this year — as well as the ACC say they are open to discussing the matter, but expressed skepticism in making changes so soon into this version of the expanded playoff.
“I’m open to a healthy discussion on the topic,” Brett Yormark told Yahoo Sports. “I certainly have a point of view that will be expressed in the room, but I do not have the appetite to give up any financial reward that comes with a bye.”
There is a sizable financial incentive tethered to those receiving a first-round bye: $8 million. Teams advancing to the field each receive $4 million. Those playing in quarterfinals — the four first-round winners and the four top seeds — receive another $4 million.
Changes after one year of data “seem a bit quick,” Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez said.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips referred to similar professional playoff formats that use an automatic bye structure for teams that win divisions or conferences, such as the NFL. He cited one of the most recent regular season games in which the Detroit Lions played the Minnesota Vikings. The winner, Detroit, won the NFC North, received the No. 1 seed and a first-round bye in the NFC playoff system. Minnesota dropped to the wild-card spot and had to travel for a first-round game, which it lost to the Los Angeles Rams.
“The NFL, which we believe is the highest level of football in our world, has a system that rewards divisional champions,” Phillips said. “You see it in major league baseball too. It’s not as if this system is so foreign. This shouldn’t be used as a convenient rationale. It deserves a review and we should talk about how it went. But it’s not some exotic structure.”
As reported by Yahoo Sports on Dec. 10, the Big Ten and SEC are poised to at least introduce a discussion about seeding the field based on the alignment of the rankings and eliminate the bye rule.
If that happened this season, the top four seeds would have been No. 1 Oregon, No. 2 Georgia, No. 3 Texas and No. 4 Penn State. Arizona State, the No. 4 seed in the current format as Big 12 champions, would have been seeded 12th. Boise State, the No. 3 seed this year, would have been seeded ninth.
The 8-9 game would have featured Boise State-Indiana, instead of Ohio State-Tennessee, for instance.
“Once the field is set, we need to discuss how it should be seeded,” Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti told Yahoo Sports on Friday. “I think some of this year’s matchups and the round in which they occurred make that conversation necessary.”
Commissioners meet on Sunday here at the site of Monday’s national title game between Notre Dame and Ohio State. However, the meeting is only scheduled for 90 minutes and is followed by another 90-minute meeting of the CFP Board of Managers, the entity’s highest-ranking governance group made up of one university president from each FBS conference and Notre Dame.
Commissioners have already scheduled a February meeting that, perhaps, may allow for more discussion on the format.
In the past, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has openly expressed interest in exploring changes to a format that, he said in December, was created for five somewhat equitable power conferences, not the current landscape of four inequitable leagues.
“We’re seeing the stress points that we knew would be there, but I actually think they are as or more volatile than we thought,” he told Yahoo Sports on Dec. 10. “Now we have a whole different [conference] dynamic. So what happens?”
Any immediate change, however, is a difficult task.
The 2025 playoff exists under governance policies of the original 12-year CFP contract that began in 2014. Those policies require unanimity for format changes.
That governance structure is expected to change starting with the extended, six-year CFP deal in 2026, when the SEC and Big Ten claim they have authority over format alterations.
In a Dec. 23 story, Yahoo Sports deeply explored playoff changes, governance and future formats, which includes a Big Ten proposal to grant multiple automatic qualifiers to a single conference — a proposal originally tabled last spring.
