Athletic directors from the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference are slated to meet next week in Nashville, Tenn., with College Football Playoff automatic bids and a possible nonconference football scheduling arrangement between the leagues on the agenda, three sources who will take part in the meetings said Monday.
The in-person meeting set for Thursday, Oct. 10, is an extension of the Big Ten/SEC advisory committee that was formed earlier this year. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti are also scheduled to attend. The status of the settlement of three antitrust lawsuits against the NCAA and power conferences is also expected to be a topic of conversation — a judge is currently considering a request for preliminary approval — as well as potentially having the Big Ten and SEC face off in more postseason bowl games.
Yahoo! Sports first reported plans for ADs from the two conferences to meet in-person and discuss CFP access and regular-season scheduling.
CFP access and regular-season scheduling are related, the sources said, because conference leaders would need to get a better understanding of what access to the new 12-team Playoff will be starting in 2026 before agreeing to increase the difficulty of their football schedules.
“The scheduling is going to be a huge one,” one of the sources said. “Can we build a scheduling coalition?”
The sources spoke to The Athletic on condition of anonymity because the conference leaders were not speaking publicly about what topics were planned to be discussed at the meeting in Nashville.
In the spring, the Big Ten proposed — with the SEC’s backing — having the two conferences receive three or four automatic bids to the CFP as all the FBS leagues were moving toward an agreement that locked in the expanded Playoff through the 2031 season. One plan had the SEC and Big Ten each getting three automatic bids to the CFP and the ACC and Big 12 getting two each, with one saved for the highest-ranked champion from the other major college football conferences.
With the 12-team format set to debut this season under previous contracts, the two conferences dropped the auto-bids issue, but they did secure a revenue-sharing system that pays the SEC and Big Ten more than 50 percent annually of what the CFP takes in when the new contract goes into effect in 2026.
The Big Ten and SEC asserting their strength and alignment has been met with some concern from the Big 12 and Atlantic Coast Conference. Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark and ACC commissioner Jim Phillips expressed disappointment with where the revenue sharing landed, and members of those conferences said automatic access that essentially predetermines which conferences are best wasn’t in the best interest of college football.
“The CFP is just another example of our industry running amok, and they’re trying to swallow the ACC and the Big 12,” Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard told reporters earlier this year.
Now auto-bids are back up for discussion, with three or four again expected to be discussed by the SEC and Big Ten, the sources said.
The CFP could also expand again in 2026, from 12 to 14 teams.
Sources said the athletic directors would like to discuss the possibility of creating something similar to the conference challenges that have become popular in college basketball nonconference scheduling. The idea is a package of SEC-Big Ten nonconference games that could potentially be sold separately to a television network, creating a new revenue stream for both conferences. Whether that could be done with existing contracts in place is unclear.
Texas-Michigan (9.19 million viewers on Fox) and USC-LSU (8.62 million on ABC) were the two most watched games of the season through the first four weeks of the 2024 schedule.
Again, though, there are other factors that could determine whether that’s possible.
The SEC still has not decided whether it wants to increase its conference schedule from eight to nine games starting in 2026. The conference is set to play next season with eight, and if it adds another league game it would also like that move to result in more money from ESPN. The network and the conference have a long-term agreement that doesn’t require ESPN to pay more for more SEC vs. SEC games.
Also, several SEC schools — such as Florida and Georgia — have long-standing annual games with Atlantic Coast Conference rivals, and adding a Big Ten game on top could create some complications.
One source said there also needs to be consideration of the potential negative impact that codifying multiple automatic bids for a conference would have on its title game. Plus, with conferences being so large — the Big Ten has 18 schools, the SEC 16 — imbalanced league schedules can lead to drastically different degrees of difficulty. Would conference auto-bids simply be determined by the standings or other factors, the source wondered?
No decisions on the College Football Playoff can be made without the commissioners of all the conferences and Notre Dame’s athletic director discussing them, but unlike the previous CFP agreement, the new deal that starts in 2026 does not require a unanimous vote to make changes to the format.
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