ACC pulls the plug on College Football Playoff expansion. What comes next?
Any chance of the College Football Playoff expanding to eight or 12 teams before 2026 came to an end Friday when ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said the conference would not support any of the new models under discussion.
And that, with an 11-0 vote required to change the current contract, is that.
Phillips cited concerns over athlete health and welfare, the changing landscape of college sports — including the ongoing overhaul of the entire NCAA structure, of which Phillips is a part — and the overall lack of coherence within college football itself as reasons the ACC would not support expansion at this point.
In other words, the ACC thinks the college football world has hard work to do on its basic foundations before it can jump ahead to fun stuff like playoff expansion.
“Collectively, we have much larger issues facing us than whether to expand the CFP early by two years,” Phillips said Friday.
This is going to be a dramatically unpopular position among fans clamoring for opportunities for more teams to compete for national titles — Georgia beat Alabama for the championship Monday, the SEC’s fifth title in eight years either way — as well as both the other Power 5 conferences, considering the Pac-12 commissioner said earlier this week he supported any and all expansion plans, and the smaller Group of 5 conferences clamoring for access to an expanded playoff.
Phillips said not only was this view unanimous among ACC football coaches — including Pittsburgh’s Pat Narduzzi, whose team would have qualified for a 12-team playoff — but wasn’t as much an outlier as the other commissioners have suggested.
If the ACC is the bad guy, Phillips said, “it’s fine.”
“Relative to how it’s been portrayed, it’s not necessarily the case,” Phillips said. “It’s not just the ACC. These are issues everybody has.”
The current CFP contract expires after the 2025 season, and there was a limited window this winter to push through expansion for 2024 and 2025. That’s entirely off the table now.
“We’re not opposed to expansion at some point. We’re just not,” Phillips said. “Right now we don’t think that’s the right thing to do in college football.”
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Expansion of the playoff has long been seen as a prime revenue opportunity in college sports, with a wide range of supporters within the industry from television networks, the SEC, Group of 5 conferences and Notre Dame.
Over the summer, a four-person expansion committee that included SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick produced a 12-team proposal for review that, conveniently, would have offered more opportunities for SEC teams to make the CFP while relieving Notre Dame of any future reason to give up its football independence and join the ACC.
When news broke of the SEC poaching Oklahoma and Texas from the Big 12, the other CFP stakeholders got cold feet on that 12-team model and started exploring other options. One immediate consequence: the formation of the ACC-Big Ten-Pac-12 alliance to counter the SEC’s leverage in negotiations.
Heading into the fall, after circulating the 12-team proposal for review at every level from presidents to football players, the ACC initially supported an eight-team model that would have been less appealing to the SEC and Notre Dame. Phillips said Friday that by November, the ACC began to decide there were more pressing issues than playoff expansion.
The ACC had three main areas of concern, Phillips said. Primary among them: Too many games for football players, a concern Phillips said was expressed by Clemson players as well as two coaches with CFP experience, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney and new Miami coach Mario Cristobal, who coached in the CFP at Oregon. Other ACC coaches, including North Carolina’s Mack Brown, were already raising that issue over the summer.
Phillips also said there were “too many unanswered questions” to push ahead with CFP expansion when there were so many NCAA issues still to resolve, from governance to transfers to the “desperate” need for Federal legislation to address the state-by-state patchwork of name, image and likeness laws to potential further conference realignment.
And there was also the need for a “365-day review” of the entire college football landscape, Phillips said, looking at “the full calendar of the sport, safety of the sport, recruiting, academics, health and safety, number of games, all that stuff.”
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
Expanding the playoff will be easier in the next contract, starting in 2026, which does not require a unanimous vote. Phillips said he hoped delaying expansion would give not only college football but college athletics in general time to get its house in order and that the ACC was not opposed to potential expansion in the future.
There’s also the leprechaun in the room, Notre Dame’s half-in-half-out membership in the ACC. The Irish are required by the terms of their membership to join the ACC in football if they ever give up independence, but Phillips said the ACC’s position was not calculated to force Notre Dame’s hand.
“Others have speculated and suggested that somehow our stance on CFP expansion is tied to the desire to have the University of Notre Dame join the ACC. That is absolutely positively not true,” Phillips said. “One is not tied to the other, despite what others may speculate. Our focus has been on our 14-team football relationship.”
That position raises as many questions as it answers. The ACC’s most sensible — and perhaps only — path toward closing the revenue gap is to bring Notre Dame fully into the fold and use that as leverage to reopen its broadcast contracts with ESPN, which were designed to facilitate the launch of the ACC Network and don’t offer the same bottom-line profitability as the SEC and Big Ten, both of which had a head start in the network business.
Playoff expansion was always a delicate dance for Phillips, pushing the ACC’s interests even as they may have conflicted with ESPN and Notre Dame. The ACC’s new stance could also bring the ACC into opposition with the two other members of the Alliance, both of which may have had more to gain from an expanded playoff than the ACC.
(The SEC, meanwhile, may have pushed the 12-team model for financial reasons but will be hurt the least of anyone by staying at four teams.)
In the big picture, the ACC is going to take heat from all sides for letting the air out of the expansion balloon, but pulling the emergency brake does serve the ACC’s narrow interests. Leverage is nothing if you don’t use it. It may even force the rest of the world of college athletics to stop lunging at easy paychecks and actually consider some of the basic issues it faces, as unpopular as that may be.
This story was originally published January 14, 2022 at 1:12 PM.
