March Madness is in full swing across the country and while hoops is at the forefront of college athletics the next few weeks, it’s not the only item on the agenda for powerbrokers far and wide. As is usual, conference basketball tournaments also represent a chance for athletic directors and school presidents to get together in one place and discuss a variety of issues .
According to 247Sports, one of the items up for discussion this past week in Nashville for the SEC was the College Football Playoff. To the surprise of nobody however, the league is sticking with the status quo.
“We voted yesterday to support the four-team football playoff,” South Carolina president Harris Pastides told the site. “We think it’s working fairly well. Some fans, of course, want eight, others want 16. If you go to 16, people want 32. Mainly this is based on player welfare. At that time of the year after playing a rugged season, the last thing these great student-athletes need is to play yet another football game. That is something that I’m confident all five power conferences will be supportive of.”
While the SEC undoubtedly benefits from the current postseason structure, the league voting to keep things at four is notable considering that Mississippi State president Mark Keenum is chairman of the CFP Board of Managers. He issued a statement a few hours before the national championship game saying that it was too soon to know if expansion was even a possibility and, in many ways, kicked the can down the road for conferences themselves to discuss.
So it looks like the SEC just discussed it and said no thanks (again). We’ll see if any other Power Five leagues follow suit but fans of eight or even 16 teams making the playoff will have to keep waiting.
247Sports also notes that the SEC threw their weight behind changes to the overtime format and to explore cross-division scheduling to include more flexibility so, for example, South Carolina doesn’t have to play Texas A&M every year and can visit other members more often. It might be a few more weeks until SEC spring meetings in Destin, Florida before we get any more movement on that front but it’s pretty clear that this weekend was about hoops in the conference and not making any waves on the gridiron.