The making of the 12-team playoff: Inside the historic creation of the new college football postseason

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — Deep within Jack Swarbrick’s home, down a flight of stairs, across a basement floor and inside a small closet, the original relics of the expanded College Football Playoff format exist.

These note-filled papers are artifacts of an 18-month-long endeavor to create the largest and most significant postseason concept in college football history. They are kept safe and secret here, buried inside a brown box, only to be unearthed as evidence of a process that, perhaps, changed the sport forever.

“Some of them are in a landfill somewhere,” Swarbrick says, “but the ones I thought would be useful if I ever wrote a book are here with me in Indianapolis.”

These notebooks tell quite a tale: how four college athletics executives spent nearly two years, in secret, covertly meeting at airport hotels, while using masking tape to cover conference room walls with drawn-up brackets, finally arriving at the 12-team playoff model used today.

The working group of three conference commissioners, Bob Bowlsby (Big 12), Greg Sankey (SEC) and Craig Thompson (Mountain West), and one athletic director, Swarbrick (Notre Dame), examined nearly 100 playoff models — from four teams to 32 — during gatherings that spanned a global pandemic and, in the end, produced the format’s public rollout in June 2021.

Three-and-a-half years later, following a drama-filled approval process, the fruits of their labor are now more tangible than ever. Bracket selections are less than two weeks away — a historic and momentous occasion for an industry that, for decades, resisted such a multi-round postseason tournament.

“It’s so beautiful what the 12 has done,” said Bill Hancock, the former CFP executive director who assembled the working group in 2019 and was one of the few people involved in their meetings. “The real beauty is the value it places on conference championships. We’re seeing that. The premium it places on conference championships … it’s magic.”

Entering the final week of the regular season, roughly 25 teams remain alive for the playoff. Twenty-two games this week — many of them a collision of fierce rivals — will impact the postseason race.

A half-dozen teams can eliminate or severely impact their arch-rival’s chances at an at-large berth, such as Vanderbilt (vs. Tennessee), USC (vs. Notre Dame) and Purdue (vs. Indiana). A few matchups even pit playoff contenders in possible elimination duels, including Texas at Texas A&M and South Carolina at Clemson.

At least two Group of Five conferences — the Mountain West and American — are still in line for one of their champions to get a spot. At the power conference level, Miami, Texas A&M and Ohio State all need to win to advance to their league’s title bout and avoid a loss that could doom them their playoff chances completely.

Meanwhile, the Big 12 race is a chaotic mess where a whopping nine teams are still eligible to make the championship game.

The 12-team format has made games that were completely irrelevant in the four-team system significantly impactful to a 12-team field. There’s 6-5 West Virginia at 7-4 Texas Tech, which could affect Big 12 tiebreakers; and a game featuring, of all teams, six-loss Oregon State, which can spoil Boise State’s playoff hopes; and don’t forget about three-loss Nevada’s mission to ruin rival UNLV’s shot at a conference title and a potential playoff spot.

“I felt like those who said, ‘Well, if you expand, you’ll negatively impact the regular season!’ They missed two things,” Sankey said. “The four-team playoff already did that. When someone lost once and certainly twice, they were out. And secondly, by adding teams, you bring a lot more people into the conversation in the month of November. We have results that confirm that thesis.”

A new era: Ins and outs of the 12-team format

At a meeting in the spring in Dallas, Hancock, in one of his last duties before retirement, gathered a half-dozen media members together to walk them through the particulars and peculiarities of the 12-team format.

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Seven months later, despite the media’s best efforts, many college football fans are left confused by the format that Bowlsby, Swarbick, Sankey and Thompson created. The most simplified explanation starts with this: The CFP selection committee, a 13-member panel of former coaches and current administrators, ranks their final top 25 teams, and those teams are then seeded into a 12-team bracket under the following rules:

(1) Conference champions: The five highest-ranked conference champions in the committee’s rankings get auto bids. Of those five, the four highest-ranked champions are seeded Nos. 1-4 based on their ranking order and receive first-round byes (conference champions are the only teams eligible for a bye and a top-4 seed).

(2) At-large berths: The remaining eight spots in the bracket — seeds Nos. 5-12 — are filled by the next seven highest-ranked teams (at-large berths), as well as the fifth conference champion. They are seeded based on their order in the committee’s rankings.

(3) Schedule: Seeds 5-8 host first-round games on campus against seeds 9-12; the quarterfinals and semifinals are played in a rotation of six bowls; in the quarterfinals, the top four seeds are each paired with their conference’s historic bowl relationship (ie: the SEC champion this year is in the Sugar Bowl).

The goal of the format was clear: reward conference champions with a first-round bye and grant home field to the next best four teams.

“We put a premium on winning a conference championship as a difficult accomplishment and one deserved to be heavily weighted,” Bowlsby said.

Not everyone agrees with the format.

The concept has taken its share of criticism for a seeding process that disadvantages teams actually ranked higher. For instance, if the playoff was today, No. 12 Clemson and No. 13 Alabama would miss the field while No. 16 Arizona State would advance through an auto bid as, presumably, the Big 12 champion.

The same can be said for the situation over the first-round byes. No. 11 Boise State is in line to be the No. 4 seed, passing six teams ranked above it.

“The aim of it was to maintain the vitality of the conferences," Swarbrick said. "I think it’s done that, because there are some conferences that without the conference championship provision might not be in this year.”

There are plenty of misconceptions out there about the format. The most notable one: that the five automatic bids for conference champions are designated to specific leagues. In reality, the bids are reserved for any of the 10 FBS conferences — whichever five champions are ranked highest.

The five auto bids and the first-round byes were not designated to specific conferences to avoid the scrutiny of congressional lawmakers, who, in the past, skewered the old BCS concept for creating a caste system.

Under the 12-team format, the four power league champions and the highest-ranked champion from the Group of Five will most often get into the field. When applying the format, just once in the previous 10 years would a power league’s champion be ranked behind two Group of Five champions and left out of the field (the Pac-12 in the COVID-shortened 2020 season).

But could it actually happen this season? In the committee’s latest rankings, Boise State is five spots ahead of the Big 12’s highest ranked team, No. 16 Arizona State. Just one spot back: No. 17 Tulane.

How they landed on the 12-team concept

How the working group reached consensus on a format is even more complicated than explaining the format itself. Many of those answers are in Swarbrick’s notebooks, buried in that basement.

“I remember we were swimming in format options,” recalls Hancock. “The guys vetted all of them. Some options went by the wayside quickly, like 32 teams. And then, the working group is noodling things over and someone said, ‘Hey, what about 12?’”

The fuse that ignited the expansion conversation happened in San Jose, California, in January of 2019.

The CFP’s highest governing body, the Board of Managers, gathered for their annual meeting hours before the kickoff of the 2018 national championship game that featured Alabama and Clemson. They delivered to Hancock a directive: We are ready to talk expansion.

The request, most specifically, came from the Pac-12 and Big Ten representatives on the board: Washington State president Kirk Schulz and Penn State president Eric Barron. At that point, the four-team CFP had produced four consecutive champions from either the SEC or ACC. Dating back to the final years of the BCS, those two leagues had won 12 of the previous 13 titles.

The Big Ten and Pac-12 wanted change.

From that request, the four-member CFP working group was born in the summer of 2019. They began to meet regularly — until the world shut down.

For many Americans, March 2020 will forever be marked by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. For those on the working group, the month also represents a breakthrough in what was then six-plus months worth of exploring playoff expansion models. During the first week of March 2020, about two weeks before life in America paused, the four men met in the Grand Hyatt at the DFW Airport and reached a consensus.

They would recommend a 12-team playoff.

And then, they did not meet again in person for 13 months. The virtual meetings “slowed” the process, Swarbrick says, as well as the pandemic-related crises unfolding.

But before that March 2020 meeting, the four men and two others — Hancock and Dave Marmion, the CFP chief financial officer — met at least a half-dozen times, usually in small hotel conference rooms, equipped with two easels of paper, masking tape and markers. By the end of the meeting, the walls would be completely covered in mock playoff brackets.

How would this model and that model have played out in years past?

Each person took individual notes, and Hancock’s staff kept the brackets and models to keep some consistency from one meeting to the next. Some of the meetings would last an afternoon. Others spanned two days.

“Every so often somebody would say, ‘Somebody keep these!’” Thompson recalled in a past interview. “There is copious note taking. It was a very legitimate process. When we would think something was quasi solved, one of the members would say, ‘Wait a minute! If we did this, it would mean that!’”

In the early days, they established one very important goal: grant access, in some way, to the Group of Five. From there, things got easier. They spent the majority of their time modeling five potential brackets: a seven, eight, nine, 10 and 12-team playoff, each with a half-dozen or more variations (the seven- and nine-team brackets were equipped with play-in games).

They attempted to poke holes in each of their models. For instance, 16 and 24-team models would be too many extra games in college football’s restricted window between title games and NFL playoffs. An eight-team model — one of the heavy favorites early on — posed other problems. Guaranteeing five or six conference champions a spot in an eight-team model meant that only two or three at-large teams got in.

Sankey was against such an eight-team model, describing the decreasing number of at-large selections from the four-team playoff as “counter-intuitive” to expansion. While he and Swarbrick supported an eight- or 12-team at-large model — often described as “best eight” or “best 12” — they acknowledged the expectation from others to have guaranteed access.

They compromised.

“On the national stage, we were the outlier in resisting any notion of playoff expansion,” Sankey said. “We could be the contrarian or have the responsibility to shape the process.”

They seriously weighed keeping the model at four teams, the commissioners say, but with a twist. The selection committee wouldn’t pick the participants until the major bowls were played. The bowls would be, in many ways, quasi quarterfinals. In the end, the men wanted to grant more access.

It’s why, in a somewhat stunning turn of events, they settled on 12. Even Swarbrick acknowledges that he originally entered the negotiations thinking 12 was too many. “No one saw that coming when we started,” he says.

In a modeling of the previous seven years (2014-20), the 12-team proposal would have only included four teams that finished outside the committee’s final top 12 rankings, the worst of which was ranked 20th. All four were Group of Five conference champions.

Ironically, the very first year of the expanded model could present a peculiar issue. The Big 12 champion could finish ranked outside of the top 12 and may be forced to play in the first round. According to the committee’s latest rankings, Boise State is in line for the bye and No. 4 seed if it wins out.

Earlier this week, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark told Yahoo Sports that there is “no rationale” for such a decision from the committee and that his champion should earn the bye.

One team never has the opportunity to get a bye: Notre Dame.

Perhaps no one on the working group compromised as much as Swarbrick. As an independent, the Irish will not have the opportunity to ever land a first-round bye. It’s a tradeoff, he says, for not having to play a league championship game.

“I said to the room, ‘Let’s have the byes just go to conference champions, and they all looked at me like I was crazy,’” he recalls.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to get the s*** beat out of me back home,” Swarbrick said.

Well, did you?

“Oh yeah.”

Will the format change again in the future?

Nearly two years of work, hundreds of hours of meetings, reams of notes, rolls of masking tape and dozens of catered meals later, the expanded 12-team format will make its debut soon enough.

Three of the four members of the working group retired from their positions over the last two years. Bowlsby, after a short stint as interim athletic director at Northern Iowa, moved back to Dallas and spends his days with family. Thompson remains in Colorado, and Swarbrick still lives in Indiana. Both men have remained involved in college sports — Thompson assisting on coaching and administrative searches; and Swarbrick helping with a new concept for the future of college football dubbed Project Rudy.

Hancock retired as well. If he’s not traveling or with family, he’s watching football. In fact, he’s fascinated to see how the committee handles what he refers to as the three “stress points” in a 12-team bracket:

(1) Which four conference champions get the first-round byes?

(2) Which four teams get the home games?

(3) And, perhaps most important, which teams are the last in the field as at-large selections?

“The light really went on with everybody on the working group when we realized the three stress levels: get in, get a home field, get a bye,” Hancock said. “We were like, ‘Wow, look at this. How cool is this going to be?’ We are seeing the fruits of that. It’s awesome. It’s remarkable.”

The Big Ten, SEC and ACC champions seemingly have the first-round byes secured. But the fourth remains a question between Boise State and the Big 12 champion. As for home games, Penn State and Notre Dame, if they win, seem all but assured of hosting in the first round. The same goes for the Big Ten championship game runner-up (Oregon or Ohio State, likely).

The at-large berths are much more complicated.

If all favorites win this weekend, the committee will likely be left with a decision between three teams for two spots: Indiana, Clemson and the ACC championship game runner-up (SMU/Miami).

However, chaos looms. What if Texas A&M upsets Texas to reach the SEC title game and Syracuse upsets Miami to instead send Clemson to play SMU for the ACC crown?

Either way, upsets of Alabama and Ole Miss last week have put the ACC in an advantageous position to get two or three teams into the field. It’s ironic in a way.

More than a year ago, during Swarbrick’s presentation of the 12-team format to each league group, ACC coaches expressed more opposition to it than virtually anyone else. Clemson coach Dabo Swinney led a push against the expanded model, and North Carolina’s Mack Brown held similar feelings.

They peppered Swarbrick with comments and concerns.

“At one point, I had to tell them, ‘Look, guys, I am just relaying you the information,’” he recalls, laughing about it now.

In the end, after a near two-year approval process that featured heated arguments, hurt feelings and meeting storm-outs, conference leaders agreed on the format. In many ways, it was historic.

At least five times since 1976, college sports leaders deeply examined a football playoff only to abandon the idea for various reasons — the influence of anti-playoff executives from lucrative bowl games; the academic calendar; and athlete health and safety concerns.

Now, weeks away from kickoff to this historic happening, the future format remains ambiguous.

This past spring, CFP leaders — the 10 conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director — re-evaluated the format when they agreed on a new six-year extension that begins with the 2026 playoff. They didn’t settle on a format, instead only agreeing to protections that guarantee (1) the five highest-ranked champions an automatic berth, (2) the field to be 12 or 14 teams in size and (3) Notre Dame to receive an at-large bid if it is ranked inside the top 12 or 14, depending on the field size.

Some are already wanting change. The Big Ten and SEC contend that they hold decision-making powers over a future format.

During 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 roundly rejected.

In an interview with Yahoo Sports from Big Ten football media days in July, commissioner Tony Petitti suggested that such a model isn’t off the table.

“You want to see what happens first,” Sankey said this week in an interview with Yahoo Sports. “One of the lessons from the creators of the CFP is not to sit there and tweak it all the time. I’m not jumping out to say we need to do this or that.”

Asked for his thoughts on conferences having multiple automatic qualifiers, Sankey deadpanned, “I don’t have any today.”

Others are more opinionated on the subject.

“Anything that is artificial or invitational, I’d push back on,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said. “You don’t reward conferences or teams at the beginning of the year, you reward them at the end of the year by their play. At the end of the day, what happens on the field should matter.”

Phillips said commissioners “made an agreement” to study how the 12-team playoff transpires this year before making any future decisions.

Many believe that the CFP will eventually grow to either 14 or 16 teams. “Bracket creep,” says Hancock, is a very normal process for any tournament. In fact, the NCAA is exploring expanding the men’s basketball tournament by four or eight teams.

Bowlsby, like many of the architects of the format, feels as if he holds some “ownership” of it, he says. He’d hate to see it changed and so soon. He’s against the Big Ten’s proposal.

“It’s really important that this is something that raises college football,” he said. “It isn’t about raising the SEC and Big Ten or any other individual conference. It’s about a celebration of college football at the end of the year. I suspect there would be some one-sided games, but I think it is important that everyone that plays at FBS has legitimate access to the playoff.”

Soon, just days from now, college football will be introduced to its first-ever multi-round College Football Playoff. On-campus postseason games, first-round byes and bubble-bursting decisions, the relics can be found buried deep in Swarbrick’s basement.

And that’s right where they’ll stay.

“It’s creating the interest that we hoped it would,” Hancock said. “Some people use the word anger. I use the word interest instead. There’s just a fascination with what is going to happen.

“That’s what we wanted it to be.”