Ole Miss came up agonizingly short of a berth in the 12-team College Football Playoff a season ago, finishing 14th in the final CFP poll despite wins over two top-15 teams – including SEC champion Georgia. In addition to the introduction of revenue sharing, the CFP’s format moving forward was one of the main topics of conversation at SEC Media Days last week in Atlanta.
Three SEC teams made the 12-team field in 2024 (Georgia, Texas, Tennessee) with Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina sitting just outside looking in. The Big 10 received four bids – including eventual national champion Ohio State – the ACC had two, the Big 12 one, the Mountain West one and Notre Dame one as an independent. According to ESPN’s Football Power Index formula, the SEC had five of the top-12 rated teams in the nation last season.
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Rebels head coach Lane Kiffin was asked last Monday when he “(got over) getting left out of the playoff.” After his brief reply on the matter – “That wasn’t that difficult. I mean, I tend to do better with things when they’re done. You can’t do anything to change them.” – Kiffin offered his thoughts on the current CFP system and how it “doesn’t take into the scheduling properly” while also noting it wasn’t just about Ole Miss’ exclusion. The Rebels lost three games by a combined 13 points, with two of those coming to teams unranked at the time.
“Then you look at these other sports, basketball, baseball, you see teams that go on to win that weren’t in the top because they played a really hard schedule and you lose some games. Like the basket goes in or out; in the end doesn’t mean you’re a dramatically different in that team. Just like you lose a game in overtime on the road,” Kiffin said at Media Days. “Or the NFL. Got the Super Bowl and here is the five seed in the Super Bowl. So I just think that it doesn’t account to that. Being a coach and understanding what teams take to go into certain places to play and have to get up every week versus other people’s schedule, it’s very different.”
According to ESPN’s FPI, 11 of the top-20 strengths of schedule nationally belonged to SEC teams and eight belonged to Big Ten teams last season. The ACC’s two CFP representatives, Clemson and SMU, ranked 28th and 41st, respectively, while Arizona State was 39th. Ole Miss’ ranked 37th.
CFP expansion and model tweaking have been proposed in recent months. Per CBS Sports, some model examples include five automatic bids to conference champions and up to 11 at-large bids, while another would guarantee four spots to the SEC and Big Ten each, two each to the ACC and Big 12, one to the highest-ranked remaining conference champion and three at-large bids.
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“I think we would push for as many teams as possible if they were evaluated based upon what their schedule looks like,” LSU head coach Brian Kelly said. “… If we’re talking about win-loss record, they’re not all the same based upon what conference you’re in and who you play.”
Missouri head coach Eliah Drinkwitz was in favor of potentially expanding the field and of creating consistent standards for inclusion in the playoff.
“The problem is we have a human committee that has no standard set of structure, of how they’re going to select. They’re all human beings. They all have implicit bias,” Drinkwitz said. “Now we’re going to go from seven to 11 and we think that’s going to solve the problem. Until we figure out what exactly the standards are, I don’t think that’s good. In my viewpoint of it, I think we should go back and try to find more ways to include teams. How do we get more people involved? Because that’s better for the players, that’s better for the player experience to have more people involved in of the potential to play for a championship. It’s better for the fan bases.”
