I don’t think 24 is the immediate goal or expectation. But if the conference WERE that large, a conference championship game would require a playoff of at least the top 4 teams.You can’t have 2 divisions that all play each other, and they are talking about chucking divisions anyway. Strength of schedule variability is just too large for the top two teams to be a fair representation.
Or does the postseason flow directly into an expanded national playoff? Would there be guaranteed spots in a larger playoff that included the SEC?
Other than scrapping divisions and having some protected rivalry games, I don’t think the B1G has to change much with just adding USC/UCLA. But if you also add Notre Dame and Stanford now (or also add two more of Washington, Oregon or North Carolina) the conference championship becomes another process that needs a new plan.
Could the post-season look like:
top 4 Big 10 playoff and top 4 SEC playoff and then the two champions meet? Would the SEC go for that? Each conference would control half of a very lucrative process. It’s an 8 team playoff, basically. Teams that aren’t in one of those leagues have no real access.
Teams like Clemson and Miami would wind up in the SEC, most likely. I really don’t know what the Baylors and TCUs of the world do. They’d have their own postseason, I guess. But the differential would grow where teams outside those two conferences were perceived as a lower level, and certainly that would be true for revenue.
