Missouri head coach Eliah Drinkwitz floated the notion of a 30-team College Football Playoff while speaking to reporters Thursday on the last day of SEC media days in Atlanta.
“Now you’re talking about an opportunity for 30 teams, 30 fanbases to be excited and engaged — engaged in giving revenue,” Drinkwitz said. “You’ve got 30 teams with players who have access to compete for a championship.”
Drinkwitz’s proposal includes automatic bids and play-in games, which he admittedly likely won’t make him a favorite of SEC commissioner Greg Sankey. The SEC coaches have been leaning toward a model that includes the five highest-ranked conference champions and 11 at-large teams.
Speaking to ESPN, Drinkwitz said he’d like to eliminate the College Football Playoff selection committee from the process of choosing teams and said increasing the field by two or four is “inconsequential.”
“Why are we wasting all this time discussing it?” he said. “If we’re going to do something monumental, do something monumental. Think outside the box. It’s a very easy approach. … We’ve all complained. The commissioner got up and complained. Coaches got up and complained about the selection process, which is understandable. It’s a human system that has no standard of picking. There’s going to be implicit bias. Why would we add more to that? I don’t understand that.”
Drinkwitz didn’t stop there, however, as he addressed the idea of whether the SEC should expend its conference schedule from eight games to nine.
“If it’s about the fans, nine games. If it’s about coach preservation — and I get it — stay at eight,” he said. “We ain’t getting in (the playoff) with eight.”
–Field Level Media
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