Nothing less than the future of college sports is being hashed out this week in conference rooms spread throughout a sprawling seaside resort in Florida.
These are the Southeastern Conference’s annual spring meetings — a gathering of school presidents, athletic directors and coaches. It might be argued that the 2025 affair carries more weight than it ever has.
Among the topics are the future of the College Football Playoff, the SEC’s own schedule, the transfer portal and the NCAA itself. All are influenced by the fate of a multibillion-dollar lawsuit settlement that hovers over almost every corner of college athletics.
As a reminder of what’s at stake, a handful of football coaches detailed the uncertainties they faced with the start of practice closing in, one of which is still not knowing how many players they’ll be able to suit up for the upcoming season.
“It’s challenging when you’re trying to figure out what you can do for football camp on July 30th, when we really don’t have much of a resolution of what that’s going to look like,” Texas A&M coach Mike Elko said.
One person who knows precisely what he wants to see on his team’s schedule is LSU head coach Brian Kelly, who told Yahoo Sports that the Tigers “want to play Big Ten schools.” LSU went 1-1 against Big Ten competition last season, losing to USC in Week 1 and beating UCLA in Week 4. LSU is a combined 3-1 against the Big Ten under Kelly (2022-present).
Some of the topics being discussed this week and the SEC’s role in sorting them out:
College Football Playoff
The SEC and Big Ten will decide whether to expand the CFP from 12 to 14 or 16 teams, and will ultimately have the final say on how many automatic bids they and other conferences will receive. Among the proposals is one in which those two conferences would receive four automatic bid, and another that allots one automatic bid to five conferences and 11 at-large slots.
“The best system with 16 should be the 16 best,” said Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin, a critic of the system last year when his team was left out of the first 12-team field. “I don’t know exactly how that’s figured out”
The Big 12 and Atlantic Coast conferences, which are the other two members of the Power Four, will be able to offer their input — but that’s all it is — along with the rest of the smaller conferences who are involved in the CFP structure.
Asked about the relationship with his fellow commissioners, the SEC’s Greg Sankey relayed a recent conversation he had with one of his predecessors, Roy Kramer, who had his share of contentious arguments with leaders of other conferences.
“He said, ‘We’d walk out of some of those rooms, and we weren’t going to talk to each other for a year. We hated each other, but we always figured a way out,'” Sankey said. “I take great comfort in that. And I take the responsibility to figure that out.”
At stake is not only what the six seasons starting in 2026 will look like, but — if the SEC and Big Ten create an unrepairable rift with the other Power Four leagues — what college football might become once ESPN’s $7.8 billion contract to televise the games ends after the 2031 season.
The SEC’s decision on whether to add a ninth league game and a possible shift from a conference title game to a series of “play-in” games for newly created automatic qualifying spots are also related to the CFP’s next format.
The transfer portal
If only there weren’t that little problem of the “student” in “student-athlete,” some of the decisions about the transfer portal would be so much simpler.
Because schools try to sync the timing of the window when players can leave one school for another with the academic calendar, football finds itself having to choose between a window that opens during the playoff — around the time the spring semester kicks off — or one that opens in the spring and predates the fall semester.
The playoff option might be more convenient for some coaches, who could build their roster and do offseason workouts with those players from January through the spring. But that could lead to a repeat of some of the awkward moves from last season, with players on teams contending for a title leaving for better offers.
“It’s really hard to be playing in a championship setting and have to be dealing with that,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said. “When I brought that up as a complaint or a problem, it was told to me, ‘There’s no crying from a yacht.'”
Ultimately, members of the American Football Coaches Association agreed that January is the way to go. The NCAA will ultimately make this decision, likely with heavy input from the new entity being formed by the Power Four conferences that will run key aspects of college sports.
The NCAA’s future
Most people at these meetings agree that the SEC isn’t looking to break away from the NCAA completely.
Then again, Sankey said, “I’ve shared with the decision-making working group [at the NCAA] that I have people in my room asking, ‘Why are we still in the NCAA?’”
This has lent urgency to the proposals being considered for even more autonomy for the Power Four, who are looking to streamline decision-making and put the most important topics — finances, litigation and infractions not related to the settlement — in their hands.
The current proposal for a slimmed-down board of directors would give the four biggest conferences enough voting power to total 65% of the vote even if the other nine board members all disagreed. It does not give the Power Four enough voting power to pass a measure if one of the four dissents.
That might not be enough.
“I think 68% is a number that’s been on our mind, because you can’t just have someone walk away at that level among four and everything stops,” Sankey said of a formula that would give three of four conferences the voting power to pass legislation. “We need to talk through those things in depth.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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