DALLAS — Representatives from Notre Dame and college football’s 10 Bowl Subdivision conferences did not reach an agreement on the 2025 College Football Playoff format after gathering for over seven hours inside the Grand Hyatt at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport Tuesday.
Multiple conference commissioners said the group could meet again in March.
Both Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey told reporters after a meeting in New Orleans last week that they believe the way the CFP seeds its participants must change. Neither stopped to speak to the gathered media on Tuesday, but ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said that the group discussed the issue of seeding at the end of the meeting.
That discussion did not yield a decision.
The distribution of first-round byes forms the crux of the seeding issue. Under the 12-team playoff format deployed in 2024, four byes were awarded to the conference champions ranked highest by the CFP selection committee. Last season, those four teams were Oregon (Big Ten), Georgia (SEC), Boise State (Mountain West) and Arizona State (Big 12).
Had byes been distributed only according to the final CFP rankings, Oregon (Big Ten), Georgia (SEC), Texas (SEC) and Penn State (Big Ten) would have been the committee’s picks.
Sporting fairness is not the only force driving the issue. The SEC and Big Ten are financially incentivized to negotiate for a more favorable setup as it relates to first-round byes. In 2024, conferences received $4 million for each of their members that cracked the field and another $4 million for every school that reached the quarterfinals. The four teams with byes earned a free ticket into that round.
‘I think it’s too early,’ Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said. ‘The CFP’s going to run some models and then come back to us next month.’
Any change to the College Football Playoff format in 2025 requires the unanimous consent of the 10 FBS commissioners ‒ and Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua. Changing the format for 2026 will not require unanimous consent.
According to College Football Playoff executive director Rich Clark, the group did not discuss the 2026 playoff format at Tuesday’s meeting.
Commissioners from the ACC, Big 12, MAC and American Athletic Conference declined to say what ‒ if anything ‒ might compel them to agree to the seeding change the Big Ten and SEC are pushing for, citing the need to gather further information.
Clark said the College Football Playoff would begin gathering the data the commissioners requested as early as Wednesday. Everyone who spoke to the media after the meeting declined to get into specifics on the data they wanted to review.
‘Some of it’s historic, some of it’s data, some of it is just understanding how things happened last year and even previous years so that we can take a good look back and make good decisions,’ Clark said.
Clark said the group is hoping to have a decision made on the 2025 format ‘soon.’
‘For (2025), that’s obviously the most pressing, because that’s for next season,’ he said. ‘We’re hoping that if we can get together next month that we can come to some decisions on 2025. For (2026), we have a little bit more time for that, but we want to get there, too. It’s important that we make these decisions for 25 now, because they’re going to impact what happens in 26 and beyond.’
Reach Texas Insider David Eckert via email at deckert@gannett.com.