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Intercollegiate Forum

Conference Commissioners Praise First Years Of CFP, Claim Size Is Just Right

Commissioners from three of college football’s Power 5 conferences gave another full endorsement of the current CFP format and resisted any suggestions toward expanding the field to eight teams. Speaking yesterday at the '15 IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, leaders of the Big 12, SEC and ACC each gave full support to the current format, which this year has yielded a playoff of Clemson, Alabama, Michigan State and Oklahoma. “I’ve never seen a startup come out of the blocks as well as the College Football Playoff,” said ACC Commissioner John Swofford, “and I think the second year will be well received. This is off to a great start.” Even before the introduction of the playoff, many involved in college football were advocating for an eight-team, and even 16-team, field. But the panel said such a move would damage the existing college bowl system, which serves in part as an underpinning of the playoff, and would dilute the value of the regular season, as well as move away from the compromises that created the playoff. “Expanding to eight (would) change the postseason in ways that are unfair to people that have invested a hundred years in the bowl tradition,” said Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby. He also argued that additional playoff games would lengthen the season, creating travel concerns, and perhaps threaten the viability of conference title games. Along similar lines, he argued that keeping every college sport, even basketball, confined to a single semester is worthy of study. “It’s worth undertaking to look at one-semester sports across the board,” he said.

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: The panel also gave high marks to the Missouri football team, which threatened a walkout amid protests over the university’s handling of racial incidents there. “We don’t live in a vacuum in the sports world,” Swofford said. “There are a lot of bright athletes there. And I recall Dean Smith, who often said that he hopes that sports leads society and doesn’t just reflect it.” Bowlsby added that he sees “troubling signs of deteriorating race relations” in the U.S., and predicted that college sports will be a forum for future events of race-related civil disobedience. “We are a very high-profile stage for those kinds of things to happen,” he said.

Quick Hits:
* SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, on how life has changed since he succeeded Mike Slive last summer: “The pace and intensity. It never stops. That has caused a narrowing of focus, and you never get away from it. So you have to reconfigure how you manage your energy and your day.”

* Sankey, on selling alcohol at collegiate events after many years of bans: “There are arguments to be made on both sides of the alcohol question, but amid revenue concerns at a lot of institutions, many more are looking at it.”

* Sankey, on the value of international games in college sports: “We need to be careful. The strength of our conference is in the communities, and we want to protect that.”

* All three commissioners opined on what the hot-button topic in college sports will be in two years. Swofford said it will be "where we are in the legal process” regarding numerous class-action suits. Bowlsby said, “The time demands of student-athletes.” Sankey: “Our attentiveness to changes in the media environment and all that is happening there.”

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