Two weeks ago, the commissioners of the Power 4 conferences criss-crossed Washington D.C., meeting with lawmakers and doing joint TV interviews, working as a unit to get congressional help on leading college sports.

This week, they’ll be in a more familiar place: a hotel conference room with the other six Football Bowl Subdivision conference commissioners, clashing over the future of the College Football Playoff and, in some ways, the future of their leagues.

The annual review meeting will be 2025’s fourth in-person gathering of CFP leaders, but it is always the most all-encompassing, spread across three days in suburban Dallas with bowl and ESPN executives in attendance. Plenty of logistical business will be addressed, but the intertwined questions that dominated the past 12 months and hang over the postseason’s future will take center stage once again:

This year’s seeding: Will the leaders change the 2025 CFP bracket structure to a straight-seeding model that seeds teams in order of their CFP selection committee ranking?
Governance: Will every league (and Notre Dame) finish and sign the longform agreement that formally gives near-autonomous control of the CFP format to the Big Ten and SEC beginning in 2026?
The next CFP format: Will the Big Ten (with perhaps the SEC in support) force through a 14- or 16-team model that gives as many as four automatic bids each to themselves?

It’s possible the CFP’s management committee, made up of 10 commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua, will again fail to resolve or even address all the biggest issues, based on conversations with more than a half-dozen people involved in the discussions, granted anonymity to discuss the status of ongoing negotiations.

“In the past, I feel like we’re going to get something done,” said one committee member, “and then it doesn’t.”

No one in the room has budged much on key issues over the past year. CFP leadership tries to avoid hard deadlines, but difficult decisions will have to be made sooner than later, and the results could further fracture the sport.

“I can guarantee some people aren’t going to be happy,” a second person involved in the discussions said. “It’s just a matter of which people.”

2025 re-seeding

Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey have said publicly they want the CFP to adopt a straight-seeding model for 2025, which would seed the 12 Playoff teams in order of their selection committee ranking, retaining five automatic qualifying spots for the top five conference champions but giving first-round byes to the top four overall teams. Any changes for 2025 require unanimity.

The commissioners have largely agreed that if a 2025 seeding change happens, the four highest-ranked conference champions would receive an additional bonus of around $4 million — the money they’d otherwise receive for the first-round bye.

In 2024, straight seeding would’ve given first-round byes to the four Big Ten and SEC championship game participants — Oregon, Georgia, Texas and Penn State — but the additional payouts to Oregon, Georgia, Boise State and Arizona State.

“If I were a betting person, I would think we get there,” said a third person involved in the discussions, who was among several cautioning it may not happen this week.

However, the ACC’s Jim Phillips and the Big 12’s Brett Yormark have publicly pushed for tying any 2025 changes to 2026 and beyond for the sake of consistency. If not, it’s very possible that college football goes through four different playoff formats over four years from 2023 to ‘26.

Why would the conferences outside the Big Ten and SEC give up those two byes in 2025? Because they’ve been looking for leverage in the discussions about 2026 anywhere they can, so the 2025 seeding is something to use, perhaps. But there is no requirement to make a decision on 2025 changes this week. If the group can’t agree on a seeding tweak, the 2024 format is already in place for another year.

“Back in the day, there used to be give and take,” said a fourth person involved in the discussions. “That doesn’t seem to be the temperature now.”

Big Ten and SEC control coming in 2026

The Big Ten and SEC made their real power play a year ago. After the two insinuated they could make their own postseason format and flexed the leverage of producing the most participants in the 10-year CFP era, the rest of the sport’s leaders capitulated.

The conferences and Notre Dame last year signed a memorandum of understanding that will give the majority of CFP revenue and decision-making power in 2026 and beyond to those two leagues, regardless of how many of their members make the CFP. They only must take “consideration” and “input” from everyone else. That MOU was quickly followed by the CFP and ESPN announcing a new contract from 2026 to 2031 worth, according to sources briefed on the deal, around $1.3 billion annually.

One year later, both the CFP governance and ESPN longform contracts have yet to be finished, and the governance deal must be done before the ESPN contract can be completed, multiple people said. Nobody is going to back out of the CFP at this point, but finalizing everything beyond the bones of the agreement has slowed the process.

With the money and power locked up, the two leagues have spent a year determining what the CFP will look like starting in 2026.

Petitti has been the driving force behind a 4-4-2-2-1-1 CFP model that would, in 2026, provide four automatic bids for the Big Ten and SEC, two for the ACC and Big 12, one for the Group of 5 and one at-large spot that would go to independent Notre Dame if the Irish hit a certain rankings threshold, according to people involved in the process. A 16-team model would add two more at-large spots.

Any model that guarantees multiple bids to specific conferences would free up the Big Ten and SEC to potentially create play-in games for their final automatic spots outside the conference championship — games that could be sold to media partners for additional revenue. Conferences with fewer guaranteed spots wouldn’t have the same freedom, a point of contention that has been brought up in the room.

Some involved believe Sankey is more concerned with refining the selection committee’s process than securing auto-bids. Even SEC Network’s Paul Finebaum has said his callers don’t want the additional auto-bids.

“I don’t think Greg believes (the SEC) needs all this stuff,” a fifth person said about AQs.

The management committee is expected to be presented with more format models and ideas this week, including potentially tweaking the selection process to remove some of the subjectivity. Instead of conferences having predetermined automatic bids, leagues could assure some CFP access using performance-based criteria, such as previous playoff results or regular-season nonconference records, according to people involved in the discussions.

Setting up a system that allows every conference more automatic qualifiers could alleviate concerns that the Big Ten and SEC are stacking the deck in their favor and turning the Playoff into an invitational. Sankey and Petitti have expressed concern with whether the selection process puts enough emphasis on strength of schedule. The question that persists in both conferences is this: Would it enhance the postseason and regular season — and make the committee’s difficult job a little easier — if there were more clearly defined paths to the CFP?

Another potential problem with auto-bids — beyond their unpopularity — is whether they could create a contractual issue for the conferences. The leagues agreed to a look-in after the 2027 season to reassess revenue distribution based on results of the new format. Yormark pushed for the look-in clause, hoping his conference’s performance would justify an increased share of revenue.

But if a conference’s access is predetermined by AQs, it could be argued that the system will undercut the conference’s ability to earn a bigger slice of the pie.

“Do they just get to push this through?” said the third person. “Nobody else is really for it.”

Questions remain about whether a Big Ten and SEC team-up can be stopped. The leagues risk inviting antitrust complaints, political blowback, legal action from state attorneys general and possible pushback from ESPN. The Worldwide Leader will not have to pay more if the field expands to 14 teams, according to people familiar with the deal, but that may change if it expands to 16.

All three questions of 2025 seeding, 2026 format and governance tie together. Disagreement on one makes the others difficult to resolve. History says the CFP’s leaders will take as long as possible in making such big decisions.

The discussions’ plodding pace can partly be attributed to the complexities of longform contracts and competing corporate interests. But people involved still worry about further codifying a Big Ten/SEC takeover, wondering if they already forfeited their chance to do anything about it a year ago.

“We spend multiple meetings talking about the same issues,” a sixth person said. “The answer is the answer.”

The Athletic’s Ralph Russo contributed reporting.

(Photo: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)