Twenty-four teams. No more SEC championship game. One-point-seven billion dollars.
That’s what you woke up to. Two of those are exactly what they look like. The third one’s lying.
Twenty-four teams is real, starting in 2027. No more SEC championship game is real too, after one more: Saturday, December 5, in Atlanta. The last one ever. And this team is still alive to be in it.
The billion’s the fib. ESPN already pays the playoff about $1.3 billion a year. This takes it to roughly $1.65 billion, an increase of about $345 million. And ESPN saves about $140 million a year because it no longer pays to broadcast the SEC, ACC and Big 12 title games. (Which were making money, by the way. Nobody killed those games because they were failing.) ESPN’s real new money is around $205 million a year.
What actually changed in the format is one line. The automatic bids are identical: four Power Four champions, one Group of Six champion. Everything else is at-large, and that pool goes from seven to nineteen.
Twelve new seats. Every one of them is a committee pick.
Now here’s the part that’s easy to miss.
The SEC owns the SEC championship game. ESPN just paid for the right to put it on TV. Nobody took that game away from us. The conferences run the playoff, and through it they voted their own title games out of existence, unanimously. Then the playoff sold ESPN the thing that replaces them.
Now run the money from the conferences’ side. The SEC, ACC and Big 12 give up about $140 million a year from ESPN for their title games. The Big Ten gives up a reported $50 million or so from Fox. Together, the conferences take in about $345 million more for the bigger playoff. Net, the conferences come out roughly $155 million a year ahead. That’s less than ESPN’s $205 million because Fox’s money goes away too.
Our league sold its own December and kept the difference.
But I’d have taken the deal.
Here’s why. I’m old enough to remember when our season was over in September. Not mathematically, but actually over. One of the best decades this program ever had, and by the time the leaves turned there was nothing left to play for, because we could not beat Florida. Ten wins didn’t matter. Eleven didn’t matter. You lost one Saturday in Gainesville and November was an exhibition.
Go read the boards right now where people pay money to follow this team, and nobody’s mourning. They’re celebrating. A twenty-four-team playoff means a season like that one still counts in December.
And there’s a playoff game at Neyland sitting in this deal. On campus. In the cold. A hundred and one thousand people watching somebody get sent home. I’ve wanted that my whole life, and I’m not going to pretend I haven’t.
That’s what we got. Here’s what we gave up.
The first Saturday in December in Atlanta is gone. Not just a game. A thing this part of the country built and everybody else copied. One more and that’s it.
And what actually bothers me about losing it isn’t nostalgia.
That game ran on a rulebook. Two teams tied, the SEC’s published tiebreaker says step one is head-to-head. You beat him, you go. Written down. Same for everybody.
What replaces it runs on a room. The committee only weighs head-to-head among “otherwise comparable teams.” This fall, that room looked at a 6-2 Tennessee team that beat a 6-2 Alabama team by sixteen in Neyland, and put eight spots between them.
Same league. Same record. Head-to-head win. Eight spots.
So the room gets twelve more seats. Fine. Then the answer is the same one it’s always been around here: win enough that nobody in that room can talk their way out of it.
We used to lose our seasons to Florida in September. Now we get to play for them in December.
I’ll take that, committee and all.
Jeremy Durham is a sports columnist for TriStar Daily and the founder of Five and a Fade.
