If not for 'The Alliance,' college football's muddled playoff picture would be much clearer this year

ATLANTA — They called it a “gentleman's agreement.”

In August of 2021, leaders from three of the five Power Five conferences — the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 — formed a pact built around their educational and athletic missions.

They called it “The Alliance.”

They struck a verbal agreement to stick together on major decisions surrounding the future of college athletics. They held a news conference. They published a press release.

They didn’t need any written contract, one said. This was a “gentleman's agreement.”

They insisted that the Alliance’s primary goal was not to serve as a voting bloc to impede, say, the passage of an expanded playoff.

It was about more, they said. It was about three like-minded leagues working to preserve the sanctity of college sports in the face of mounting external and internal pressures.

More than two years after the Alliance formed — and about a year after it unceremoniously collapsed — the pact between the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 stands as one of college sports’ greatest failures.

It prevented the sport’s postseason from expanding a year earlier than many officials had originally planned.

Without that gentleman’s agreement, without the 16-month delay in approving an expanded playoff, without their hoops and hurdles, their roadblocks and speed bumps, college football’s postseason this year would likely incorporate not four teams but 12.

“You had that idea. That opportunity could have been there,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey told Yahoo Sports in an interview earlier this week. “But I have colleagues that chose to simply oppose.”

Here on Saturday evening in downtown Atlanta, Alabama and coach Nick Saban lobbed a wrench into the four-team playoff discussion. They beat Georgia 27-24 to win the SEC championship, end the Bulldogs’ 29-game win streak and create, potentially, more chaos for the CFP selection committee than it has ever faced.

In the 10th year of the CFP, picking the four playoff participants has never been more difficult.

There will be one open spot for a group of one-loss teams after Florida State preserved its undefeated season late Saturday night.

Someone is getting left out. Is it a one-loss Alabama? An unbeaten Florida State? What about one-loss Georgia or one-loss Texas? And there’s one-loss Ohio State, too.

Each team will give you their own talking points.

The Tide just won 11 straight games, hold the best win of the season over Georgia and beat three other ranked teams. Florida State, despite being without its starting quarterback, walloped LSU to start the year and won at Clemson. Georgia claimed the last two national championships and beat two top-11 teams.

Texas won at Alabama — by double digits — and then won the Big 12 on Saturday (by double digits). Ohio State’s only loss: At No. 2 Michigan.

Who to choose will be a talking point for Sunday.

Why they have to choose is a talking point for Saturday.

And that reason resides in a gentleman’s agreement gone awry, a verbal commitment blown up by one of its leaders, former Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren, who pillaged the Pac-12 of USC and UCLA 10 months after the Alliance formed.

However, by that time, the damage — a delay in approval of playoff expansion — was done.

The Alliance may sound like something from Star Wars. It might sound positive, heroic, like a squadron sent off to destroy evil. In actuality, the Alliance was a deterrent. It prevented, it delayed, it damaged.

And now, in 2023, college football — all of us in this messy, wild industry — are paying the price for the decisions of a few.

Let’s start from the top, shall we?

In June 2021, a subcommittee assigned to create an expanded playoff model introduced that model to the full group of 10 FBS commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director. The idea was to swiftly pass a concept for which college football fans clamored for years. Many believed that by January 2022, and maybe sooner, they could garner the necessary approval — a unanimous vote from commissioners.

Then, in July 2021, news emerged of a realignment thunderbolt: Oklahoma and Texas were moving to the SEC.

A few weeks later, the Alliance formed. The gentleman’s agreement was not in response to the SEC’s realignment, they said. Many high-ranking officials disagree.

All of it happened as the playoff expansion model was being socialized across college football, garnering wide support and excitement.

But inside the decision-makers’ room, the three Alliance commissioners — Pac-12’s George Kliavkoff, ACC’s Jim Phillips and Warren — found issues with the model. Months passed. Each meeting led to another which led to another which led to another — none of them producing an agreement.

Finally, in February of 2022, after five months of squabbling with one another in what at times turned into intense debate and petty bickering, commissioners voted. Needing unanimous support, the vote failed, 8-3. The Alliance voted against.

“There was a meeting [in June 2021] and everybody was pretty much on board and then the move of Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC occurred and caused mistrust,” Notre Dame president John Jenkins, a member of the CFP governing board, told Yahoo Sports last fall. “That undermined the conversation.”

Nine more months passed before CFP board chair and Mississippi State president Mark Keenum gathered the CFP presidential board together to lead the passage of the expanded playoff — the very same playoff model that had been introduced 16 months before.

Implementation was set for 2024. It was the quickest the CFP could do it.

If the model was approved earlier — in January 2022 as many originally expected — this year’s postseason could have been a 12-team playoff. “It could have been cool,” CFP director Bill Hancock said earlier this fall in a meeting with reporters in Chicago.

Cool? Yes, indeed.

Imagine a lineup where no one-loss contender is left out, where Georgia gets into the field and Ohio State and Alabama, and even mighty Oregon. Penn State might be in too, and Missouri as well.

Asked earlier this week about the topic, Sankey said that Alliance commissioners over that 16-month delay never really made clear their problems with the expansion model.

“I think that it was the inability to actually make the points of concern so they can be addressed that is troubling,” he said before pausing.

“So here we are.”

Here we are. Four teams, not 12.