ATLANTA — Georgia coach Kirby Smart said the SEC coaches haven’t reached a consensus in their support for a 16-team playoff model that would include the five highest-ranked conference champions and 11 at-large teams.
But Smart said most SEC coaches favor that format for 2026 because it wouldn’t limit their participants like automatic qualifiers.
“I think the best representative model of the best teams is probably the 5-plus-11 model, but I don’t think that’s a consensus in the SEC,” Smart told ESPN at SEC media days Tuesday. “… There’s been a major strain put on the colleges that are borderline, bubble. These coaches just want an opportunity to get in that because the bigger the playoffs have gotten, it’s minimized the bowls.
“You’re sitting at a midtier SEC program, and you need to have a reason for your fan base to be excited. You need an opportunity for your fan base to think they’ve got a chance, and that’s hard in some of the models.”
The SEC coaches began to lean toward the 5+11 model at their spring meetings in Destin, Florida, after seeing graphs and elements from a study of the playoff that simulated what would have happened in various models. The Big Ten has supported a format that includes guaranteed spots for conferences, with the most going to the SEC and Big Ten, but Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin said metrics should help determine the 16 best teams — and there shouldn’t be any guarantees for conference champions.
“I had a coach that played Clemson last year say, ‘Put Clemson on my schedule every week compared to playing SEC teams,'” Kiffin said of the defending ACC champs. “But there might be years that also the ACC really does have real teams. It might change every year, but not where people are just in because [they win the conference championship] or even worse, you have a really good record in the conference, you’re the second team in the conference. You didn’t win the championship, but you only lost one or two games, but you didn’t play anybody.”
Kiffin said the 13-member selection committee should comprised “educated media people” who watch a lot of football — not people with affiliations to any schools, as is currently the case with sitting athletic directors who are recused from voting for their schools and leave the room during those discussions.
“What, are you gonna put Robert Kraft in to decide whether the Dolphins get in?” Kiffin said. “An AD of a school? Like, what?”
As the FBS conference commissioners continue to debate the format for 2026 and beyond, their Dec. 1 deadline looms. South Carolina coach Shane Beamer said the meeting in Destin was when the coaches realized, “Let’s not just cap ourselves at four and hope for the best.”
“There’s years that the SEC legitimately could have gotten maybe seven teams in the playoff certain years, if it was five automatics and then 11 of the best,” Beamer said. “… It might mean that there’s not four SEC teams or three SEC teams, but it also might beat that there are seven or eight SEC teams one year.”
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said Monday that the Big Ten has a “different view” of what the playoff should be and that that could lead to the field remaining at 12. Multiple sources in the Big Ten have said they won’t consider a 5+11 model unless the SEC and ACC move to a nine-game league schedule.
Smart said that to go to nine league games, he needs assurance the CFP selection committee isn’t selecting teams “based on the loss column alone.”
“I don’t know how that can ever be fair,” he said. “It is what it is: Two conferences are stronger than others, and if you don’t agree with that, then you probably just don’t know college football. And for us to say that every loss is equal, I don’t know that the people in that room agree with that. I love the idea of a nine-game schedule. I think it takes us out of scheduling issues. It plays a really strong conference schedule, but not at the expense of costing us opportunities that our fan bases want in the CFP.”
