SBJ College: The future of weekly CFP rankings

What a whirlwind week it’s been.

A swing that started in Indianapolis for a college friend’s wedding on the evening of Indiana’s Big Ten title was followed by a westward leap to Las Vegas for the Intercollegiate Athletics Forum. The trip finally wrapped up this weekend with the Army-Navy Game in Baltimore (don’t worry, I got a few crabcakes and plenty of Old Bay before I dipped out of town).

Army-Navy has long been on my bucket list. Getting to see it up close for the first time on Saturday was genuinely one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever been a part of. It’s a one-of-a-kind spectacle that everyone should get to see at least once in their lives.

Congrats to Navy on getting to sing second this year.

The dust has settled, at least temporarily, in South Bend after Notre Dame was left out of the College Football Playoff field.

A week of warring words from Irish AD Pete Bevacqua was met with equally terse comments from Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark. ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips largely abstained, but boy, did it all make for some kind of drama in the immediate aftermath of finalizing the 12-team CFP field.

While the grandstanding from all parties is something, the sentiment I heard throughout my travels last week was simpler: Why does ESPN keep running its rankings show?

“I don’t know if it’s healthy for the process,” Alabama AD Greg Byrne told SBJ. “... What you don’t want to do is paint yourself into corners.”

The MOU signed by the 10 conference commissioners, Bevacqua and ESPN establishes five rankings shows as part of the CFP process. If you’re ESPN, what incentive is there to get rid of it? People are mad, but they’re also still watching.

The real issue is that the more the committee is forced to talk out of both sides of its mouth to rationalize its rankings each week, the more its credibility gets undercut.

The Notre Dame conundrum is a perfect encapsulation of the damage both the rankings and the show inflict on their respective parties. During the first week of rankings, the committee slotted the Irish eight spots ahead of a Miami team it lost to in Week 1. And then Notre Dame kept winning, as did Miami.

Ultimately, the Canes flipped with the Irish without either playing on conference championship weekend. And with that, Marcus Freeman’s bunch, as talented as any team in America, was left out.

Siding with a 10-2 Miami team that beat a 10-2 Notre Dame team head-to-head isn’t really all that odd. Most agree with the end result. It’s the process that created a stir.

Inconsistency like this and the committee’s perpetual incongruities in dealing with Notre Dame-Miami erodes trust. Doing it every week on a made-for-TV segment does little beyond rile people up.

In a world where football is driving everything, the sport would well do to look toward its basketball counterparts for an assist. The NCAA basketball tournament has created a nice foundation for what this could look like moving forward. The committee releases its top 16 teams in late February and again as part of the greater bracket reveal in March.

“Do you not have the show until later in the year? Do you not have it every week? What could be an adjustment to it?” Phillips told SBJ. “I don’t know for sure.”

Sources told SBJ last week there hasn’t been any conversation among ESPN and the commissioners around getting rid of the rankings shows. ESPN declined to comment when reached by SBJ on Tuesday.

The CFP management committee annually hosts a wide-ranging meeting around the national championship game. That is expected to be the case again next month, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the ranking show comes up then.

Given how this year went, you’d be hard-pressed to believe it won’t come up at some point.

The era of private equity (capital, investment, etc.) is here in college sports.

Utah broke the seal with its $500 million deal with Otro Capital. The Big 12 has followed suit, as it’s finalizing what is essentially a credit deal through RedBird Capital and Weatherford Capital.

A source told SBJ Big 12 members will have to decide whether to opt into the RedBird/Weatherford deal in the next few months, though final details are still being ironed out.

The Big 12 deal is notable for a few reasons:

• It provides schools an ability to borrow up to $30 million from a $500 million pool.
• The borrow rate is believed to be below 10%, meaning schools aren’t giving up massive amounts of equity or borrowing at significant rates for instant cash.
• It opens the door for schools to launch new revenue-generating measures. (Think more LED boards that can be sold to advertisers, building out in-house production studios, etc.)

The biggest piece of working with RedBird? That would be getting the Big 12 tied into CBS — albeit indirectly.

RedBird is a major investor in Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company.

With the Big 12 expected to be in the market for its media rights before its current deal with ESPN and Fox expires in 2029-30, the alignment with RedBird leads one to believe CBS might inherently want to be involved with the league.

There is no guarantee CBS will bid on the Big 12, but the alignment through these deals puts the conference into business relationships that might help boost its media value down the line.

“We are not in the private equity business,” Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark said Tuesday at SBJ’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in Las Vegas. “We do not want to give a stake in our conference. We believe that the trajectory of our conference is terrific. We’ve got a lot of growth. We don’t want to share that.

“Having said that, strategic alliances, whatever they look like, that help us create value for our member institutions [are] something I’d sign up for.”

That the Big 12 is the first league to get such a deal over the line also shouldn’t come as a massive surprise. Yormark has pushed the idea of PE in college sports for years.

This deal has been six months in the making and marks another major step for the conference as it tries to shrink the revenue gap between it and the rest of the Power Four.

With the Big 12 now into the private capital world, expect others to follow suit.

As I reported Saturday, officials at Army and Navy are locked into extremely early conversations about the future of their annual rivalry given ongoing uncertainty around the College Football Playoff.

The skinny is that a CFP that expands to 16 teams would likely see first round games infringe on the standalone 3pm ET CBS window the Army-Navy game enjoys.

That window is crucial for Army-Navy, driving millions in sponsorship dollars and television viewership. The game averaged 7.2 million viewers per year in the decade before 2024’s record-setting 9.4 million viewership. CBS also signed a 10-year extension last December to broadcast the game through 2038. That deal is believed to pay into the seven figures annually — value derived from the game being played in its current window.

There’s also a windfall for the schools. Broader revenues of the Army-Navy game account for as much as 30-plus percent of the academies’ annual athletic budgets, sources told SBJ. While the economics of service academy athletics are different than those elsewhere, no one wants to take a haircut.

“It’s important for Army and Navy to have a stand-alone [window],” Army Superintendent Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland told SBJ. “The fact is, [Saturday], there’s other games on, but they’re in different time slots. We’ve got to try our best to protect that, but we also understand the reality of the College Football Playoffs with expansion and the second and third-order effects on conference championships, the regular season, and how that plays out.

“We can’t just say, ‘Oh, we’re going to have our own game and our own day.’ We’ve got to be cognizant of that, and as a result, we have to be adaptable, too.”

• For full coverage of SBJ’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, check out the event’s Behind the Scenes newsletter.
• In this week’s magazine, SBJ’s David Broughton and Emma Grace Jimenez look at the various gift packages committees are putting together for the bowl season.
• In the final SBJ Facilities newsletter of 2025, SBJ’s Bret McCormick examines the specific skills required to design and develop mixed-used projects in college sports.
• TNT Sports on Monday made it official that during the 2026 College Football Playoff, the network will carry not just two first-round games but also two quarterfinal games and a semifinal as part of its sublicense deal with ESPN, notes SBJ’s Austin Karp.
• Karp also talks with Fox Sports’ Rob Stone about why conference championship games still matter on the latest episode of the SBJ Sports Media podcast.
• At IAF, SBJ’s Rachel Axon chats with ESPN’s Jessica Mendoza about the threats Olympic and women’s sports face in college athletics.
• The ACC released its 2026 football schedule Tuesday. Cal, Duke, Louisville, Miami, NC State, Pitt, SMU and Stanford are playing nine conference games. Boston College, Clemson, Florida State, Georgia Tech and North Carolina are playing eight, per the Athletic’s Chris Vannini.