INDIANAPOLIS -- On the eve of the College Football Playoff's national title game, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick and Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby were sitting next to each other during yet another lengthy meeting about playoff expansion, aligned in their support for the 12-team proposal that they had spent almost two years working to create. Then, before the meeting ended, Bowlsby abruptly left the room.
"I knew it wasn't a bathroom break when he took his briefcase with him," Swarbrick quipped.
Bowlsby and Swarbrick -- along with Mountain West Conference commissioner Craig Thompson and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey -- developed the 12-team model that has been picked apart, turned upside down and pieced back together since it was made public on June 10.
"Have you seen the movie 'Groundhog's Day'?" Bowlsby asked dryly following the third straight day of meetings in Indy that totaled about 15 hours and amounted to no change to the current four-team field.
Seven months and nine in-person meetings after revealing the proposal that was initially applauded by fans, coaches, media and others who follow the sport and have long clamored for a more expansive CFP system, those who created the plan and publicized it have been unable to implement it. The entire process of expanding the playoff has been called into question, and feelings of frustration and anger have boiled over as commissioners refuse to budge on various points. They all agree the playoff should be expanded -- they just can't unanimously agree what it should look like or when it should begin.
"When everybody in the room favors expansion," Swarbrick said, "we have to be able to find a way -- at least by the next term -- to have an expansion model we can get agreement around."
How it evolved from celebration to stalemate can be traced back to arguably the most tumultuous summer in the history of college athletics. Why the bickering and second-guessing have continued for months, though, has many puzzled. Some longtime athletic administrators have said privately they've never seen anything like the pervasive amount of mistrust, or the inability to come to a consensus.
The question now is, what comes next?
If the format is going to change before the current 12-year deal expires following the 2025 season, those involved must unanimously agree to it. The ACC might have delivered the knockout blow to that early timeline on Friday, when commissioner Jim Phillips stated publicly for the first time that "now is not the right time to expand the College Football Playoff." The reality is no single person or conference has derailed expansion, though the spotlight is now on the Big Ten and ACC commissioners, who have both publicly dug their heels in on their leagues' respective playoff positions. Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren remains steadfast in his belief that the Power 5 conference champions deserve a guaranteed spot in an expanded playoff -- a view vehemently opposed by many others in the room.
Some involved still haven't given up on the power of persuasion to get it done as early as the 2024 or 2025 season, though the prospects of that happening are continuously shrinking. The CFP's management committee, which is composed of the 10 FBS commissioners and Swarbrick, has met in Dallas, Chicago and Indianapolis -- and will bring it full circle again to Dallas in four to six weeks to continue the discussions.
The commissioners know time is running out.
"I think we're in a nine-overtime contest," Sankey said. "And none of us can accomplish a 2-point conversion right now. Eventually, even that game ended. So there's an opportunity here, but I think we all -- including me, including us -- will have to look circumspectly at our positions."
ESPN spoke with a majority of management committee members and CFP executive director Bill Hancock to explain how a once-celebrated plan unraveled but still remains a goal, and how it might be salvaged.
How we got here
Every season, on the morning of the CFP national championship game, the 11 presidents and chancellors who have ultimate authority over the playoff meet with the 10 commissioners and Swarbrick. It's typically a mundane business meeting reviewing the season, budgets, host cities, the ESPN contract and, of course, the playoff -- which to that point had been perceived by those in the room as working just fine.
January 2019 in Santa Clara, California, was different.
While publicly downplaying rumblings of expansion, the presidents discreetly directed the commissioners and Swarbrick to study the possibility and report back in a year. It was the midpoint of the 12-year deal, and while there wasn't any glaring issue with the current format, the presidents had agreed it was a good time to evaluate if it could be any better. That June, the CFP organized the working group of Bowlsby, Sankey, Swarbrick and Thompson.
At the behest of the presidents, they began digging into "some 63 possibilities for change," including models with six, eight, 10, 12 and 16 teams -- each with a variety of scenarios. To settle on the 12-team plan they would ultimately unveil, concessions had to be made. Swarbrick agreed to a system in which Notre Dame as an independent would never get a first-round bye that was awarded only to conference champions. And yet, he said the relationships among the four of them "was as positive as any committee I'd ever served on."
"It was very rewarding," Swarbrick said, "because we had very different views, and everybody along the way had to modify the position they started with. It wasn't easy for me to surrender the possibility of a first-round bye. It had a lot of personal consequence for me in my day job, but I thought that was the sort of thing that needed to happen to advance the model, and everybody in the room had a version of that."
Two years after the working group formed, it presented a 12-team model that would include the six highest-ranked conference champions and the next six highest-ranked teams. When they explained it to the other seven commissioners for the first time, Thompson said, "There was great acceptance."
"There was near-universal support because it increased access and kept more teams in the playoff hunt longer," he said. "... The only thing that was kind of bubbling was, 'Why would you play those first-round games on campus versus in the bowl structure?' That was the biggest deal."
At that moment.
Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff, who began his role July 1, 2021, hadn't technically started yet, though he shadowed former commissioner Larry Scott at the first meeting in Dallas. Phillips had been on the job for a mere five months. The plan was to use the summer to solicit feedback in each conference from university presidents, athletic directors, coaches and athletes. There was a sense that when they met again in September, there was a good chance the presidents would give the commissioners the green light to figure out how and when to actually implement a new system. At the very least, there was positive momentum.
Instead, it never got to a vote.
When the proposal was initially announced, there was no guarantee it would be rubber-stamped -- rather those involved cautioned repeatedly it was "the first step in a long process" -- but the release was interpreted by many as an encouraging sign that a 12-team playoff would happen eventually.
For Kliavkoff, that was part of the problem. He told ESPN he has "absolutely no issues with the process or the work that the subcommittee did," but that the public reveal might have impacted its chances.
"My issue with what happened was, never in the history of college athletics has there been an announcement of a model that everyone that needed to agree to that model on had not yet agreed to," he said. "When you announce the model before everyone who needs to agree to it agrees to it, you create an assumption that it's a done deal and just needs a rubber stamp. ...
"I wish we would have not shared that with the public until everyone that had to agree to it had had the opportunity to work through the few issues we had. I think we would've been done already."
Hancock told ESPN the CFP has always operated with subcommittees who present their work to a larger group, and has repeatedly said the organization has no regrets about publicizing the 12-team format before it was approved. Multiple commissioners have said there was concern about misinformation being leaked.
"The fact is, the intent was the proposal be presented to people on campus -- dozens of people on campus -- and we thought it would be best to announce it so everybody had the same information," Hancock said.
The decision to form that subcommittee, develop a model and publicize it without the input of the full group was publicly and privately questioned by some who weren't involved in the process from the onset.
"My God," Thompson said, "we have now spent more time [together] -- the 11 of us -- in the last seven months than the four of us did in two years, by a landslide. Why do we keep talking about that? Why is that even in somebody's thought process? It's irrelevant."
The public release of the plan was the first bombshell of a summer filled with an unprecedented amount of change in college athletics -- drastic decisions that have altered the entire landscape since 2019, when the working group was first formed. Some have surmised expansion would have been agreed to in 2020, had COVID-19 not handed the commissioners an entirely separate, all-consuming daily challenge.
The implementation of name, image and likeness (NIL), a landmark Supreme Court decision and conference realignment shook the sport and continue to today. The NCAA is in the midst of rewriting its entire constitution this month. The combination of those events is a major reason the ACC has put the brakes on expansion.
Phillips, who served on the NCAA Constitution Committee and the NCAA Transformation Committee -- both tasked with restructuring the organization's governance -- said the focus needs to be on college athletics as a whole right now.
"We don't have a College Football Playoff problem," Phillips said. "We have a college football -- a collegiate athletics/NCAA problem."
New leaders in three of the five most powerful conferences in the country have changed the discussion -- and the chemistry in the meetings.
"We had people who were coming into the room with very new ways of thinking," Warren said. "You know, just different backgrounds. Great ideas. ... So it just seems like when we started meeting in June, we were still formulating the individuals in the room who had some very forward-thinking ideas that definitely needed to be heard."
Last August, Kliavkoff, Phillips and Warren formed "The Alliance," which at the time was meant to form scheduling partners, bring together like-minded academic institutions and stabilize a landscape that was again uncertain with another round of realignment -- none more drastic than Big 12 co-founders Oklahoma and Texas announcing their intent to eventually bolt to the SEC. That move set the stage for the already-dominant league to become the Power 5's first 16-team superconference.
Sankey, whose dual roles in conference realignment and playoff expansion have been questioned by some, has repeatedly pointed out his conference never advocated for a bigger playoff. On the contrary, he described the league's willingness to even engage in a conversation considering expansion "an enormous give." Scott, the former leader in the Pac-12, and former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany initially made the biggest push for it.
"We find ourselves in this debate about format expansion -- not because of some motivation for the Southeastern Conference, rather, any number of individuals involved and leading conferences opined about both the desire and the urgency for expansion," Sankey told ESPN. "And we had direction from the CFP Board of Managers ... to engage in this and then enter our feedback about the desire for a format to be introduced. And so here we are, and I think, at least in my experience in listening and reading, there's amnesia about what's brought us here."
Nobody will forget, though, the day Oklahoma and Texas decided to join the SEC.
"There was an initial burst of enthusiasm and support when it came out," AAC commissioner Mike Aresco said of the 12-team format. "But I think the expansion, the realignment -- the realignment definitely threw a wrench into it. I don't think it should have in the end because I think it's a good plan and I think we need it for college football. But I do think that paused it to some extent."
Few, if any, expected it to pause into 2022.
"This is my 35th year as a Division I commissioner," said Thompson, the most senior conference leader in the room. "I've been on the [Division I] Council twice, the men's basketball committee twice. I've been in a lot of meeting rooms with a lot of peers. I have never seen the hardened positions and, 'We're not going to budge, not going to give, don't want to talk about compromise.' I've never seen that in intercollegiate athletics."
Reasons behind the resistance
On Friday, when Phillips spoke to a small group of reporters on a teleconference and for the first time publicly explained the ACC's position at length, it was like screeching brakes on an already slow-rumbling truck trying to pull over.
Twitter erupted with anger. Reporters asked Phillips if he was ready for the ACC to be labeled as "the bad guy." It was a public reaction to what Phillips' fellow commissioners had been listening to for months behind closed doors.
"He's been consistent with that stance for a while," Mid-American Conference commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said. "Our membership, and I think to the best of my knowledge, the reaction of the other conferences, is that they're prepared to move if we can work out the various details, but clearly their group is in a different spot right now."
Phillips pointed to three main reasons for the league's reluctance: too many unanswered questions as it relates to the health and safety of the athletes; the "overall disruption in college athletics," including the new NCAA constitution and a desperate plea for federal legislation as it relates to NIL; a 365-day "holistic review" of policy as it relates to the sport.
Even though the ACC champion, No. 12 Pitt, would have qualified for a 12-team playoff had it existed this year, Phillips said his coaches are unanimous in their opinion that "this isn't the right time."
"We've tried to get feedback from [our athletes] and for us, it's been Clemson," he said. "They don't want to play any more games. They don't. I don't know what Georgia and Alabama felt like after Monday night, but Clemson student-athletes that have participated, they don't."
While the ACC is looking at the uncertainty as an obstacle to expansion, others see it as a reason to expand.
"The way I'm viewing this is it's an excellent opportunity for us to bring a cornerstone of stability at a time when the enterprise needs it," Steinbrecher said. "I guess we have a little different lens on it."
Bowlsby said he and Phillips have been friends for a long time, and that "whatever we have in the way of a personal relationship transcends anything that may result from a difference of opinion on the issues."
"I don't know that there's any convincing him," Bowlsby said. "I think he has his marching orders from his presidents and chancellors. We all have people that we work for, and he's there representing the people he works for."
Phillips isn't the only one -- and he made that point on Friday. In the Big Ten, Warren has pushed for his league champion to be guaranteed a spot in the future playoff. When it comes to support for automatic qualifiers, sources have said Phillips is open to the idea, Kliavkoff can be convinced, but the Big Ten stands alone as the most entrenched.
"I've made my point really clear on why I feel that way," Warren said in Indianapolis. "There's a whole list of items that we just need to kind of work through. I just feel strongly with our conference, the difficulty of our schedule, the demands of our schedule and going back to what was developed, even originally. I wasn't in the room, but I heard it was originally that the conference champions should be given a lot of credit, and so I'm just following that. That's important."
While there was no guarantee for the Power 5 or Group of 5 conference winners in the original plan, Bowlsby said it was "intentionally favorable to conference champions."
Even though it excluded the Irish from a first-round bye, Swarbrick still contends it's the best scenario for the sport.
"I'm more convinced than ever that the original plan as proposed, the more it gets vetted and tested and challenged, the more it withstands that scrutiny, the better it looks," Swarbrick said, "so I remain firmly committed to it. And I, like everyone else, am frustrated."
So are many college football fans.
What's next?
Just as the ACC has changed its stance on pushing for an eight-team format, there is a faint optimism that Warren will eventually relent on automatic qualifiers, putting the pressure squarely on the shoulders of the ACC as the lone remaining obstacle -- a label that may or may not be enough to sway the league. Of course, there's also the possibility that Warren's willingness to lead the charge on automatic qualifiers might lure more to support it.
Fans need to at least brace themselves for four more years of four playoff teams -- and wait until the CFP no longer needs a unanimous agreement to move forward with the 12-team plan.
CFP executive director Bill Hancock told ESPN on Friday that if they wait until what they have deemed "Year 13," the first season in a new contract, they need a majority of the management committee to agree to it -- including three of the Power 5 commissioners.
Everyone else at that point can choose whether they want to participate in the playoff.
"It's clear that we don't have consensus on it, among all 11 on any of the options, and as a result, we should start focusing on what would get enough people to say yes in the next version of the CFP after the current contract ends," Kliavkoff said.
Some haven't given up on getting it done sooner. It's going to be a few weeks before the commissioners reconvene in Dallas, so Swarbrick said, "What's more important is what happens between now and the next meeting."
"I'm hopeful the discussions go on in one-on-one conversations or smaller group conversations, people are able to discuss ways past the objections," he said. "It's just hard in a group setting not to be in a position where you're just repeating the last discussion."
While the ACC's concerns and the topic of automatic qualifiers have dominated the headlines, there are other setbacks. The commissioners continue to discuss revenue distribution, how the New Year's Six bowls will factor into it (particularly the Rose Bowl, which wants to cling to its traditional day, time and media rights) and how best to cram it all into a season that might need to start at Week 0.
"If everyone has to have every item on their Christmas list," Sankey said, "it will not be a merry Christmas."
Sankey has said repeatedly for years his conference can stay at four, but he has also publicly supported the 12-team model, along with an eight-team model that rewards the eight best teams. Just hours before kickoff of the national championship game, the Pac-12 released a statement supporting any of the six-most discussed models -- but it didn't account for how that would impact the Rose Bowl.
In spite of obvious lines that have been drawn, they all agree they should keep talking. At the very least, they need to determine host cities for the final two years of the current contract.
"The tenor in the room is one of frustration, but on the other hand determination also, because we're determined to keep talking and to keep making our points and hoping that we can persuade and we can move this thing along," Aresco said. "It just seems like failure should not be an option."
Bowlsby conceded he was frustrated when he left the meeting in Indianapolis, but said he doesn't have the "prerogative to be long-term frustrated" because they have to get back to the table "and work our way through the things we have to resolve."
"If we'd had a long time left in the meeting, I wouldn't have left," Bowlsby said, "but it was obvious we had ground to a stop."
The question is if -- and when -- they can find a way to move forward.