Is SEC's Greg Sankey Going To Ruin The College Football Playoff Moving Forward?

The College Football Playoff committee is on shaky ground as it is, after a disastrous end to the 2025 regular season. 

Its decision-making was baffling, to put it mildly. After years of punishing every single team that lost its conference championship game by at least one spot, the committee decided that Alabama simply making the SEC Championship Game was enough to ensure the Tide could not move down. Even if they lost in an embarrassing blowout. 

They lost in an embarrassing blowout. And did not move down. That luxury has, again, never been afforded to any other team in the past few seasons of the Playoff committee format. The 2022-2023 committee, for example, dropped the No. 4 USC Trojans six spots in the rankings after they lost the Pac-12 Championship Game thanks to Caleb Williams getting hurt mid-game. 

What motivated this decision? It's easy to pin it on the whims and vagaries of committee members, or a misplaced skepticism of the resumes from other teams. But there's another explanation that has become more widely discussed: the SEC simply wields too much power. 

RELATED: Former Notre Dame QB Brady Quinn Says ESPN Is Controlling College Football Playoff

Based on some recent remarks from SEC head Greg Sankey, they're only looking to wield more of it.

SEC's Greg Sankey wants more SEC teams in the College Football Playoff field each year. (Photo by Tim Warner/Getty Images)

Greg Sankey Can't Help Himself

In an interview earlier this month on the SEC Network ahead of the selection, Sankey did some of his usual lobbying for SEC superiority. Then went further, demonstrating in one profoundly disturbing sentence what his ultimate goal is as conference commissioner.

"I actually think we deserve seven in," he said referring to the number of conference teams that should be in the playoff. "I think the seven teams that are in the top-14, half of the top 14 teams are from the SEC. That's an indication that this league is different, the expectations are different, the competition is different, and the rewards should respect each of those elements."

This is, of course, nonsense. But beyond being nonsense, it's a dangerous sign for the future of the playoff given how Sankey, the SEC, and ESPN handled this season.

As Brady Quinn brought up when talking about the selection committee and ESPN recently, the SEC was furious to get just three teams into the 12-team field after the 2024-2025 season, and even more furious that Tennessee was humiliated by Ohio State, and Notre Dame blew out Georgia. The SEC was exceptionally furious that the Texas Longhorns needed some beneficial late game officiating to avoid a well-deserved loss to Arizona State to reach the semifinal. Before themselves losing to a Big Ten team.

The SEC's superiority complex already relies on ignoring actual outcomes and data in favor of hypothetical situations. Every other conference team would lose 15 games if they played an SEC schedule. SEC teams, despite frequently losing to other conferences, would go undefeated in every other conference.

When data shows that SEC teams don't deserve to be included, that data is wrong. It's a forcefield of willful blindness. 

That's all well and good. Let them think what they want, right? Except that delusional mindset extends to the top, and the top is frequently in contact with partners at ESPN, who are heavily in control of the playoff selection process. Again, does this mean there's some grand conspiracy where Sankey calls over and the committee does what he says? No, of course not.

But it's abundantly clear that the committee heard the farcical arguments inaccurately pushed by ESPN personalities in the lead up to the SEC Championship Game, and while it was happening, that Alabama simply could not be punished for losing. BYU could be punished for losing the Big 12 Championship Game, but Alabama could not. Even if the Tide's one big accomplishment didn't outweigh inconsistent, often extremely unimpressive performances.

There's no doubt that ESPN, and the committee itself, heard complaints from SEC fans and coaches about undeserving 9-3 teams like Ole Miss and South Carolina making the playoff in last year's edition. The thinking there was a near copy of Sankey's rhetoric in that interview; whatever SEC teams do just counts for more because they are wearing the correct conference patch. Sold-out home stadiums automatically mean the team on the field is superior to other conferences with lesser attendance. It doesn't even matter when the team stinks, because that too is a sign of the SEC's depth.

This is the concern moving forward. Sankey is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, person in college football right now. He wields an enormous amount of influence. And when he is selling the message that the SEC should make up nearly 60 percent of the playoff field, because any team that has an even remotely decent season in the SEC should get what it wants, it's extremely dangerous.

They got five in, when they deserved, at most, four. How much worse will it get next year, when the SEC moves to nine conference games? The naval gazing and self-obsession with wins over Kentucky and Mississippi State and big-name teams that aren't actually good is going to reach nauseating new heights. 

Pushing for four-loss SEC teams to reach the playoff sounds ridiculous, but Sankey's signaling that's exactly where he's heading. And with the power he wields, he might actually be able to influence his propaganda partners, and by extension, the susceptible committee to do what he wants.