Mike Aresco is fresh off a three-week vacation to London and Scotland — a voyage he’s wanted to make for years now available to him in his first few months fully retired.
He and his wife visited Buckingham Palace. They toured some of the most renowned Scottish scotch distilleries. And they played golf at the world’s most spectacular oceanside courses.
But just a few months ago, Aresco, then the commissioner of the American Athletic Conference, found himself in the midst of heated negotiations over the future of the College Football Playoff. He prides himself in helping the Group of Five earn automatic access in the expanded postseason.
But this week, from his retirement home in Idaho, he wonders for how long that will last.
“Down the road, I do think it might be a concern,” he said, “especially if our G5 teams do not do well enough and aren’t ranked high enough.”
Days away from kickoff of, perhaps, the most anticipated season in college football history, excitement brews over the possibilities created by an overhauled and expanded playoff — a four-round, 12-team format with five automatic qualifiers, seven at-large selections and a football version of the First Four played at on-campus stadiums.
And yet, even before a single round is complete in the expanded postseason, there is a sharp eye on what the future holds.
Will the Group of Five maintain its one automatic qualifying spot?
Will leagues such as the SEC and Big Ten eventually get multiple automatic berths in the field?
In this time of historic transformation in college sports, there is but one certainty: “Change is inevitable,” Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said recently, an appropriate summation of these times.
That includes changes to college football’s postseason.
In fact, all of this change, and potential change, has led to an in-person meeting next week in Dallas of commissioners from the Group of Five conferences: Mountain West, American, Conference USA, Sun Belt and Mid-American. Call it a “G5 summit,” where conference leaders plan to discuss some of the most pressing issues upon their membership — the bottom half of the 133-team Football Bowl Subdivision — such as NCAA governance, private equity’s interest and the House settlement-related revenue-sharing model.
But, perhaps, chief among those issues is the possibility of a reshaped postseason incorporating the bowl system, an arrangement that may generate additional television dollars and provide a secondary championship for those G5 teams not competing in the CFP.
“We are open to all of that. That would be really interesting and have some value,” Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez said. “What if it’s like an NIT of football?”
To be clear, Nevarez adds, Group of Five leaders are not interested in relinquishing the automatic spot in the new expanded playoff. “We’re not touching that,” she said. But, MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher asks, in what other ways can those five conferences create more interest and more revenue?
“Everything is on the table,” new AAC commissioner Tim Pernetti said at his annual football media day.
Before launching into the possibilities on the proverbial table, let’s understand what's definitely happening this December and January — an expanded playoff the likes that college football has never seen.
For years, even dating back to the 1970s, college football leaders discussed a true, expanded playoff. Because of the academic calendar, a fight over money and, most notably, the influence of bowl games, it never happened.
Finally, it's here. And everyone seems on board, even those at first against the concept.
In the new expanded playoff, there is an automatic bid for each of the five highest-ranked conference champions and seven spots for the next highest-ranked at-large teams. The automatic qualifying structure allows for the winners of the SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 to get into the postseason. A fifth automatic bid paves the way for the highest-ranked Group of Five champion to enter the field.
For the G5, preserving the CFP spot is of utmost importance, both because of the automatic access and the millions in revenue distribution. The Group of Five will split about $115 million annually, or about $1.5-2 million per school. While that’s not the amount originally expected — G5 leaders were planning to receive twice that distribution — the cash is consequential to school budgets in the lower-resourced group, most of which hover around $30-60 million annually, or a fraction of those in the power leagues.
However, there is fear that access and distribution for the G5 may be shortlived.
While conference commissioners agreed on a new eight-year deal with ESPN to televise the expanded CFP, they stopped short of settling on a specific format for the final six years of the contract starting in 2026, instead putting the power of any future format in the hands of the industry's two behemoths — the Big Ten and SEC — as well as media partner ESPN.
“They could change the format. They’ve left it open,” Aresco said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s all up in the air (after the 2025 playoff).”
Speaking to Yahoo Sports from her conference football media days last month, Nevarez acknowledged that “concern,” but believes that the value to a partner like ESPN is holding a “national FBS championship,” one that incorporates all 133 teams not just half of them.
“We don’t have the leverage or the value commanded by a few but that access piece is very important to us,” Nevarez said. “It changes the equation drastically if we don’t have that.”
During CFP negotiations in February and March, power conference leaders “threatened” to remove the G5’s automatic bid, Nevarez said. But, “to their credit, it never came off the table.”
What if it would have?
“If we had lost access, we would have taken some kind of action,” Aresco said. “That would have been ruinous for us.”
For that reason, the next two years are the most important in the history of the G5: They’ve got to win.
“I hear it in the (CFP commissioners) room,” Aresco said. “‘You don’t really belong! We’re giving you the spot that could have gone to a higher-ranked team!’”
While the highest-ranked G5 champion is assured a spot, it is possible that team is not ranked in the CFP selection committee’s final top 25. If this scenario happens, the committee will choose the best G5 champion, CFP leaders say.
It nearly happened last season, when Liberty, the highest-ranked G5 champion, was ranked No. 23. If an expanded playoff existed, the Flames would have earned the automatic spot as the No. 12 seed, surpassing 11 teams ranked between Nos. 12 and 22, including 10-2 Oklahoma, 9-3 LSU and 9-3 Notre Dame.
Liberty lost to Oregon last year in the Fiesta Bowl. The score: 45-6.
But for as many of those matchups, there is what happened two years ago in the Cotton Bowl, when Tulane upset USC, 46-45.
Still, a certainty does exist: The G5 has been weakened by realignment and the modernization of compensation rules. Over the last several years, many of the division's top-resourced schools elevated to the power leagues, and the infusion of NIL money, as well as the implementation of free transfers, has further widened a gap between the power leagues and G5 that was already quite wide.
Around the corner is likely another gap-widening concept: athlete revenue sharing.
“We are a farm system,” Liberty coach Jamey Chadwell told Yahoo Sports this spring.
This year, by many projections, Nevarez's league returns the most capable teams to challenge for that spot: Boise State, Air Force and UNLV. But there are plenty more, of course: Memphis and UTSA in the AAC; Liberty and Jacksonville State in Conference USA; Toledo and Miami (Ohio) in the MAC; and App State and Texas State in the Sun Belt.
Of course, the G5 isn’t the only group with something to prove. The ACC and Big 12 are on the proverbial clock.
When applying the 12-team format to the last 10 years of the CFP — while, again, considering realignment moves — the Big Ten leads all selections with 38, followed by the SEC at 34, Big 12 (19), ACC (15), G5 (10) and Notre Dame (4). The new CFP revenue distribution formula, based around past CFP success, delivers 58% of the money to the SEC and Big Ten — an amount that frustrated many league administrators but one that could change in the future.
A “look-in” clause exists four years into the contract to re-evaluate each conference’s success over the first four playoffs of the eight-year deal. If the Big 12 and/or ACC have enough success in 2024-2027, perhaps they’ll get a larger chunk of the cash? That’s the goal, said Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark, who led the discussion in having the “look-in” provision as part of the contract.
The same goes for the ACC.
“We (ACC) have to play better and get more teams in the CFP so that in the next six-year cycle, when it is re-evaluated, we’ll get more revenue,” Miami athletic director Dan Radakovich said earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the future format remains ambiguous.
During CFP negotiations in the spring, the Big Ten proposed a 14-team playoff featuring multiple automatic qualifiers for the power conferences: three each for the SEC and Big Ten; two each for the ACC and Big 12; one reserved for the best G5 champion; and three at-large spots. The 3-3-2-2-1 concept was considered a compromise from an original proposal that included four automatic qualifiers for each the SEC and Big Ten.
In the end, college leaders settled on a distribution model and left a future format undecided.
Aresco said he was one of several commissioners to “fight against” any model that grants multiple AQs to each power league, but he believes such a format may be in the industry’s future if the richest leagues use their muscle to get their way.
In an interview with Yahoo Sports from Big Ten football media days last month, commissioner Tony Petitti suggested that such a model isn’t off the table. Without revealing specifics of the proposed, multi-AQ format, Petitti said if leaders “get the postseason right,” his league and others could then have the ability to “play stronger non-conference matchups.”
“This is all connected,” he said. “Look, there are differences between pro models in playoff formats and what’s traditional in college sports, but there’s a lot to be said about keeping teams alive late in the season to have a chance to compete. I don’t think that’s controversial.”
Will the G5 eventually be cut out of the playoff?
Will the power leagues get multiple AQs?
As college football opens a new era — the Expanded Playoff Era — questions linger about the not-too-distant future.
One thing is certain: Change is inevitable.
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