The likelihood of a 24-team College Football Playoff seems to continually increase. Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, with the support of nearly every other power broker in the sport, has spearheaded efforts for massive playoff expansion. But for proponents of the current 12-team format, the last bastion of hope to keep the sport recognizable seems to be the SEC, where commissioner Greg Sankey has been a proponent of a 16-team solution.
While appearing on That SEC Podcast, USA Today’s Matt Hayes said, rather crudely, that he believes Sankey feels so strongly about the issue that the SEC will entrench itself to prevent expansion to 24 teams.
“I feel like this is all just like— I mean, I know no other way to say this— just like mental masturbation right now,” Hayes said. “We are not going to 24 teams because the SEC is not getting out of their stance. They will not do it.”
The Playoff is NOT expanding, says @MattHayesCFB
“The (SEC) will not do it. They are at the point, alright, we are Sparta.
“We are 300, you guys are the Persian Empire, and we are going to win.”
Full chat: https://t.co/coSTBYmYvw pic.twitter.com/Pt8ZvOhXaW
— SEC Mike (@MichaelWBratton) May 17, 2026
“They’re now at the point where they’re like, all right, we’re Sparta. We’re 300, you guys are the Persian Empire, and we’re gonna win. That’s where they are right now. They’re not getting rid of their championship game, which is the fabric of their conference. They’re not going to 24 because they don’t want to go to 24.
“They are digging in right now, and they are not going anywhere. Because they know that nothing can be done without them.”
Based on the memorandum of understanding signed by each conference in 2024, the Big Ten and SEC must agree on any change to the playoff format before it is implemented.
An overwhelming concern around a 24-team playoff is how it could dilute the value of the college football’s regular season, widely seen as the best regular season in sports, in part due to the importance of every single game.
Hayes’s assertion frames the SEC as college football’s unlikely hero for traditionalists who would like to see some semblance of the sport’s normalcy preserved. The only question is how far will Sankey and Co. go to maintain the current status quo, or at least force a less dramatic expansion to 16 teams.
