Wanting 'college football to be strong nationally,' SEC commissioner Greg Sankey optimistic about expanded playoff

Despite his league winning 12 of the last 16 national championships, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said one of the most important components of an expanded 12-team College Football Playoff would be helping the sport not to be so regionalized.

«My view is how do you bring more people into November, including in our league,» Sankey told ESPN. «Our league would be fine, even at 16 teams with a four-team playoff. At 14, we've taken half the field a couple of times. Nobody else has done that. When we go to 16 and add Texas and Oklahoma, we're not going to have less opportunity by adding those two. We're going to have more.

»But we've excluded the West Coast and everything west of the Rockies for all but two years. We want college football to be strong nationally, and I think that's the responsibility we all have."

Sankey was a member of the College Football Playoff working group, and after another wave of realignment in August that included USC and UCLA moving from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten, there is a renewed push to expedite the proposed 12-team playoff to the 2024 season. Currently, the four-team format remains in place through the end of the 12-year television contract that runs through the 2025 season.

Since the advent of the College Football Playoff in 2014, Oregon (2014) and Washington (2017) are the only two Pac-12 teams to make the playoff. By contrast, at least one SEC team has appeared in all eight playoffs. Alabama and Georgia have faced off in the championship game two times — in 2017, with Alabama winning 26-23 in overtime, and last season, with Georgia winning 33-18.

«I'm fine if we win the championship every year, but we have a responsibility to think about the game from a bigger picture,» Sankey said. «I want