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The field for the first twelve-team College Football Playoff is set, with games set to kick off next week. The Big Ten and SEC led the way with four and three bids into the College Football Playoff, respectively.
But, for SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, that simply wasn’t enough bids for his conference, widely considered to be the best in college football. In fact, he’s still complaining about it days after the bracket was released.
SEC champion Georgia was given the number-two overall seed, while SEC teams in Texas and Tennessee were given the 5th and 9th seed, respectively. But, most notably, Alabama was left out of the field as a 9-3 team, while Ole Miss and South Carolina also had arguments for the final spot that ultimately went to SMU.
Those in and around the SEC, including Greg Sankey, have argued that their league is much tougher than the other leagues, especially the Big 12 and ACC. Thus, although the trio of 9-3 teams left out have more losses than the 11-2 SMU Mustangs, they should be in due to the strength of schedule disparity between the schedules they had to play and the schedule that SMU had to play.
Ultimately, though, losses to bad teams like Kentucky, Oklahoma, and an average LSU team ultimately kept those three schools out of the playoff. That’s not a good enough explanation for Greg Sankey.
Sankey made his first comments since Sunday in Las Vegas while he’s in the city for an awards dinner Tuesday night, and he continued to pile on the committee. Here’s Yahoo! Sports with more.
However, in an interview with Yahoo Sports on Tuesday, the SEC commissioner acknowledges that the 12-team format — one he helped create in 2020-21 — was intended for a world that featured five somewhat equitable power conferences and not the current landscape of four inequitable power leagues.
The most recent conference realignment strengthened the Big Ten and SEC as they absorbed previous brands from the Pac-12 (USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington) and Big 12 (Oklahoma and Texas).
“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 said from the Bellagio Casino and Resort in Las Vegas, where he will attend the National Football Foundation’s annual awards dinner on Tuesday night. “Now we have a whole different [conference] dynamic. So what happens?”
The rule permitting five conference champions into the field “displaced” three of Sankey’s teams and one ACC team, he said. No. 11 Alabama, No. 13 Miami, No. 14 Ole Miss and No. 15 South Carolina were left out. No. 16 Clemson, the fifth-highest ranked conference champion, earned the automatic bid into the field.
“That was going to be a problem. We’ve seen that problem now,” Sankey said. “Not all things are created equal or formed equally.”
We get it, Greg. Teams that probably aren’t as good as the three SEC schools that were left out got in to the playoff. But, had Alabama, Ole Miss, and South Carolina taken care of business, at least one more of them would’ve been in the College Football Playoff.