College football expansion could come as early as Monday

ATHENS, Ga. — Alabama coach Nick Saban, whose team has appeared in seven of the eight College Football Playoffs since the beginning in 2014 and made the finals five times, warned of what effect the playoff would have on the bowl games from the outset. So, when he was asked this week about what was best for college football and the continued talk of playoff expansion, his response was to suggest asking somebody else.

“Look, I’m not the one who needs to be deciding what the playoff needs to be,” Saban said during Alabama’s video news conference Monday. “There’s a lot of good people out there that can make a decision as to what’s best for college football. But the more we expand the playoff, the more we minimize the bowl games, the importance of bowl games. Which is what I said when we went to this (a fourteam playoff). So, I don’t think that’s changed. And I also think it’s come to fruition.”

Indeed, an increasing number of players are opting out of bowl games when their teams don’t make the playoff. But indications are that’s not about to get better.

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey is one of those in position to decide what the playoff looks like in the future. He’s for expansion, whether it be to eight or 12 teams, and he will be involved in discussions to that end this weekend in Indianapolis.

The CFP’s management committee — which consists of

Sankey, nine other FBS commissioners plus Notre Dame’s athletic director — is meeting in Indianapolis this weekend to continue the conversation. According to Sankey, some actual decisions could get made this time. The presidents and chancellors also will meet Monday morning in Indy, where No. 1 Alabama and No. 3 Georgia meet in the eighth CFP Championship game Monday night (8 p.m., ESPN).

“I’ll walk in prepared to make a decision,” Sankey said on SiriusXM SEC radio Wednesday.

“We’ve not been in a circumstance to do that as a group so far, and perhaps that can happen.”

Sankey went on to say he’s going in with tempered expectations because, “it’s an important decision and deserves the utmost care.” But he also said that there’s a consensus among college football leadership favoring expansion, and coming to the end of a 12-year cycle of agreements, “we’re not at a point of making decisions around that desire.”