The Big Ten and SEC have been encouraging the College Football Playoff landscape to change, and the NCAA has yet to find a stable, consistent format that makes everyone happy.
The 2024-25 CFP format was a 12-team playoff bracket with the five, highest-ranked conference champions receiving automatic bids. The top four conference champions received a bye in the first-round. The other seven spots were filled out by the highest-ranked teams remaining, according to the CFP Selection Committee. This format revised the original bracket that included the six, highest-ranked conference champions with the leftover spots filled by the six, highest-ranked teams remaining.
Heading into he 2025-26 season, the picture is still under revision.
How the College Football Playoffs format could look in 2025-26
In May 2025, the CFP format was officially tweaked again, according to ESPN. It was decided that CFP would take on a straight seeding format with the highest-ranked conference champions still receiving an automatic bid. The four highest-ranked of all 12 qualifying teams, regardless of if they are a conference champion or not, would receive a bye in the first-round.
This still did not appease all conferences in the NCAA, notably the Big Ten and SEC. In return, the commissioners decided for a total do-over, according to Brett McMurphy on X, to determine what the 2026 CFP format will look like.
The Big Ten and SEC pushed for their conferences to have four automatic qualifiers and the ACC and Big 12 to have two per conference. As expected, the ACC and Big 12 opposed this pitch and eventually the SEC followed suit. Instead, the SEC, ACC, and Big 12 openly supported the 16-team playoff bracket with five automatic qualifiers and 11 at-large teams.
The Big Ten and SEC butt heads over regular season schedules influencing the CFP format
Alongside the 16-team bracket, the SEC wants strength-of-schedule to be an important deciding factor for the committee wen ranking teams. Not only does the conference as a whole support this but so do individual players.
Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia said on a podcast that certain conferences are not challenged week after week in the regular season.
"You want to play with the best – you don’t want to play with the Big Ten … You ignore those calls," Pavia said on the "Bussin' With The Boys" podcast, according to Spartans Wire. " ... The SEC, it’s like week after week. You’re going to get beat on. The Big Ten, you’re not gonna get beat on with the Purdue, Nebraskas.”
Determining the playoff bracket with strength-of-schedule being one of the most important factors, though, also leads to some questions. If SEC schools, like Vanderbilt, were thrown into schedules from other conferences, it can't be said for certain that they wouldn't struggle.
Some conferences also don't play the same number of league games, which goes into their schedule strength or lack thereof. The SEC, for example, plays eight league games while the Big Ten plays nine in the regular season. The Big Ten has also encouraged playing an SEC school in the regular season, but the SEC continues to oppose this idea.
"I don't think there's any way we can do a 16-team playoff if [the SEC is] not at nine," Illinois head coach Bret Bielema said.
As for Penn State, committee bias remains a larger issue.
"There's all these complaints about the BCS, but then we go to this, and I think it goes back to really, my answer is, the problem is, everybody voting and everybody involved in the process — whether you want to be biased or not, we all are biased," Franklin said, according to CBS Sports in early June.
When commenting on selection committee bias, though, the Nittany Lions' 2025 playoff fate was not something fixing bias would change. If anything, switching to a 16-team bracket would help improve objectivity as opposed to the Big Ten-pitched model that automatically gave two conferences eight playoff seeds.
At the latest, the 2026 CFP format must be finalized on Dec. 1. With the straight seed format still in consideration and conferences throwing in their wants and opinions, the playoff landscape will likely be up in the air for a while.