Big Ten and SEC could damage the CFP with automatic bids. Plus, South vs. World in CFB?

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Scroll to the end to see which football coach has explained his career moves by citing both a 1990s country star and the fifth century’s notorious “Scourge of God.”

Big-League Birthright: Nobody wants this

A few guys in suits stand to financially benefit from something, even though it would be unpopular among the millions of people it’d affect.

I could be referring to any number of events throughout time, but I’m referring to one potential outcome of tomorrow’s New Orleans meetings between the Big Ten and SEC, the second time college football’s imperial duo has huddled within the past few months.

They’ll discuss a handful of major topics, as Ralph Russo, Seth Emerson and Scott Dochterman explain, with one question already drawing the bulk of the attention: whether they’ll recommend the sport’s perpetually evolving postseason give multiple automatic CFP bids each to the two leagues coincidentally in charge of the CFP.

(Now is when it’s important to remember, according to the current arrangement, that the Big Ten and SEC “can push through format changes without consensus from the CFP board of managers,” as that trio of authors describes.)

For months now, one version of that idea has loomed as the most unsettling: four guaranteed spots each. They could at least bother trying to talk us into two first?

The NCAA’s basketball bracket has sprawled to 68 teams, yet promises just one spot for each conference. Meanwhile, FBS football’s Power 2, fresh from sending the Big 12 and ACC scrambling for members across the continent and dumping the Pac-12’s carcass at the feet of TV networks, are interested in the possibilities of declaring themselves entitled to half or more of the tournament every year.

• This past season, that would’ve meant 9-3 Alabama replacing 10-2 SMU — just so four, rather than three, SEC teams could fail to reach the semifinals.
• In a season like 2015, it might’ve privileged Northwestern, who’d lost two games by a 78-10 total, over a North Carolina team whose two losses had been by one score each.

It’s not even like this would usually change the number of CFP teams from those leagues. History suggests they’d usually get four anyway, especially in a 16-team field. Instead, it’d hurt the sport by adding a formal failsafe on top of the Power 2’s massive list of advantages. Here’s a dud of a story: David beats Goliath, and then Goliath uses his personal mulligan.

I keep hoping all of this is building to a tidy future in which the Big Ten and SEC have divvied up literally all of college football, then given each school a promotion-and-relegation path toward the biggest paydays. (They could even put all the West Coast teams in the Big Ten’s westernmost division, which they could call “the Pac-12.”) Like those stories where Doctor Doom takes over, then runs things benevolently, but only because that makes Doctor Doom look more impressive.

I think there’s a capitalist argument for that version of CFB, and I might lay it out at some point, but it feels far away, at absolute best.

For the time being, in a scathing column, Stewart Mandel says the arrogant four-AQs notion threatens college football’s popularity in a way the much-bemoaned transfer portal never could. Now we’ll wait to see how enticing short-term greed really is.

Eric Hartline / Imagn Images and Sean Gardner / Getty Images

Quick Snaps

🏈  Deion Sanders, Eddie George, Michael Vick, DeSean Jackson, Terrell Buckley. So far, whenever HBCUs hire former NFL stars, it tends to have an instant impact.

🎓 Elsewhere, Stewart grades all 27 FBS head-coaching hires, from Temple hiring FCS legend K.C. Keeler to UCF shrugging and resuming Scott Frost Day.

🌊 Oh right, the Pac-12 still needs one more football school. Like, urgently. Chris Vannini has five candidates, including three who’d apparently require some persistence.

🤝 After nearly a decade of Big Ten leaders touting nine-game schedules as virtuous (aka profitable), could their SEC rivals-turned-buddies align? Seth Emerson doesn’t rule it out.

💰 Speaking of Deion, keeping him at Colorado long-term could require a salary in the $8 million range, Christopher Kamrani explains.

💰 Penn State‘s new $3.1 million defensive coordinator, Jim Knowles, seems to have always wanted to end up in Happy Valley, say people who’ve long known him.

👀 Last week’s most-clicked: Manny Navarro’s first wave of oddly specific 2025 predictions.

Who Ya Got?: Inspired by international hockey fights

Regionalism has always been a big thing in college football:

• In the 1890s, as soon as Walter Camp and company began publishing All-America teams, he was charged with East Coast bias for overlooking players from the West — which sounds familiar, except big-time football had conquered only so much territory, so “West” still meant “Midwest.”
• Within a decade, football had flooded the map, and California hosted an East-West postseason game. Michigan, the “East” rep (from a league still named the Western Conference), defeated Stanford in that inaugural Rose Bowl, filling hearts with Midwestern or Western or Eastern pride.
• Later, Alabama’s win over Washington in the 1926 Rose Bowl began resounding in legend as having won respect for the overlooked South. At least everybody agreed on where the South was.

That last matchup, the South against the world, has lingered ever since, especially during the BCS and CFP eras, when the “SEC” chant morphed from an underdog’s boast to a bully’s taunt to ironic mockery.

So, inspired by the NHL’s wildly successful 4 Nations Face-Off, an All-Star tournament between players from four prominent hockey countries, today’s “Until Saturday” podcast proposed a CFB game between players from Southern schools vs. players from everywhere else.

I stopped by, and we pondered some 2024 and 2023 lineups. Despite the Big Ten’s CFP victories, the South might have been favored in both of those All-Star games, especially if it’d gotten to pull from the states of North Carolina and Texas (which sounds drastic, considering Lone Star State recruiting strength, but actually balances the number of schools on each side).

Now it’s your turn. In an average CFB season, whose All-Stars would win: the South or the world? Vote here. I’ll let you decide which states you consider Southern, since as CFB history shows, directions are all relative.

Streeter Lecka / Getty Images

Today’s Rabbit Hole

1. One of those two aforementioned UNC losses in that 2015 season was a 17-13 Thursday opener against Steve Spurrier’s South Carolina.
2. However, Spurrier’s victorious Gamecocks would stumble to a 2-4 start, otherwise beating only George O’Leary’s UCF along the way.
3. O’Leary would soon resign amid UCF’s 0-12 season, bookending his 11-year Orlando tenure with winless campaigns. (He’d then be replaced by Scott Frost, Mark I.)
4. But weeks before O’Leary’s exit, Spurrier himself had also skedaddled. Strolling into a de facto resignation presser, he said, “Alright, let’s get this over with.”
5. That called to mind his explanation of his likewise abrupt 2002 exit as head coach of Washington’s NFL team: “I was like Jo Dee Messina and her song ‘My Give a Damn’s Busted.’ Toward the end there, my give a damn was busted.”
6. In 2020, he explained his Carolina vanishing by citing a different thinker: “In ‘Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun,’ it says, ‘When defeat is inevitable and there’s no way you can win, it’s better to retreat and come back and fight another day.’”

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(Top photo: Kirby Lee / USA Today)