College football coaches endorse 24-team playoff, eliminating conference title games

Notably, multiple coaches on the AFCA board are members of the SEC, including Oklahoma’s Brent Venables and Vanderbilt’s Clark Lea. It’s not hard to imagine why, either. Easier access to the playoff means better job security for head coached.

At the moment, the SEC is the lone holdout among the power-four conferences, with both the ACC and Big 12 having recently come around to supporting a 24-team model. If enough SEC coaches begin to pressure Sankey, it is possible the conference could eventually accept expansion to 24 teams.

The format endorsed by the AFCA would necessitate dramatic changes to the college football calendar, the largest of which being the elimination of conference championship games. The weekend traditionally set aside for those games would become the first weekend of an expanded playoff. In moving the playoff up, the 24-team format could host its national title game on the second Monday of January, one week earlier than the current 12-team playoff ends.

If this calendar is adopted, it’d leave the Army-Navy game in a precarious spot. As part of its proposal, the AFCA endorsed maintaining a standalone window for Army-Navy, which is traditionally played on the second Saturday in December. However, that day would overlap with the first or second round of a new 24-team playoff, which would seemingly prevent either service academy from being selected for the postseason unless the game was moved up. Officials from both service academies are weighing options to move the game, and Army coach Jeff Monken has even suggested playing the game during Thanksgiving week, a move that would likely create another set of scheduling conflicts.

However, the Army-Navy game, even though it is historically one of the most-watched college football games of the year, is small potatoes in the grand scheme of playoff expansion. With the AFCA’s latest endorsement, it seems momentum is building for a 24-team format. But, as is often the case, the devil is in the details, and whether the CFP governance committee can find a format and calendar that is acceptable to all parties remains to be seen.

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