While ESPN has often been seen as a major cheerleader for the SEC and its college football dominance lately, every now and then, someone from their crew breaks away from the pack.
Rece Davis, well-known from College GameDay, recently shared his thoughts on the SEC and Big Ten’s new College Football Playoff expansion ideas—and he’s not exactly loving what they’re pitching.
“I’m not a fan of automatic bids for the SEC and Big Ten,” Davis said on the College GameDay Podcast. “Take this year’s 12-team format, for example—if you had to put a fourth SEC team in, it gets pretty murky. There’s no obvious pick.”
Under the current proposal, both the SEC and Big Ten would lock in four automatic playoff spots each season. That would leave just two for the Big 12 and ACC, one for a Group of Five team, and one at-large spot. If that setup had been in place for 2024, teams like Missouri or Ole Miss might’ve made the cut—despite not really proving they belonged.
“If you’re locked into giving a set number of teams from one conference a spot, sure, they might earn it in some form,” Davis explained. “There’s talk of doing matchups like 3 vs. 6 and 4 vs. 5, where the winners get the auto-bid. That could be exciting to watch, no doubt. But the reality is, sometimes the fifth or sixth-best team in a conference just isn’t playoff-worthy. And if they pull off a random upset, they could take the spot from a team that was genuinely better.”
He added, “So yeah, it gets messy. Overall, I’m not crazy about the automatic bid idea. I get that it adds some drama, but I can’t fully back it. Most of the time, those teams are gonna get in anyway based on merit. Forcing it just doesn’t sit right with me—and maybe that’s the traditionalist in me talking.”
At the end of the day, the SEC and Big Ten aren’t slowing down anytime soon. And if there’s one thing that’s clear? Greg Sankey and Tony Petitti aren’t too worried about what people think when it comes to reshaping (or wrecking) college football.
