MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. -- The meeting was scheduled for 90 minutes. It ran for two and a half hours.
College Football Playoff executive Rich Clark and his staff attended the SEC's spring meetings on Wednesday to explain how the selection committee selects its field. The coaches and athletic directors in the room came with a laundry list of grievances.
What metrics does the CFP's selection committee utilize to help form their opinions? Why wasn't Texas weighed more heavily in discussions last season? What kept Vanderbilt out at 10-2? And why should the Big 12's Texas Tech and BYU rank higher than some SEC teams with stronger schedules?
The meeting was tense at times, sources in the room told CBS Sports.
The undercurrent feeding those questions is an anxiety this league has faced for the better part of the last three years: when the SEC plays a ninth conference game for the first time this fall, will anyone on the CFP's selection committee give it credit?
The SEC debated the ninth game for years before it finally said yes last fall. Coaches largely signed off on the belief that the playoff was about to expand to 16 teams. The data supported that the SEC would routinely get more teams in the field among the last four spots than other conferences, and an additional game against arguably the deepest conference in the country would provide more room for a brutal schedule to be rewarded.
That meant a three- or maybe a four-loss SEC team could -- no, they argued, should -- receive bids in an expanded field.
Then the playoff stayed at 12. And it may stay there a while longer as the Big Ten and SEC remain dug in on supporting separate models — 24 vs. 16 teams — and yet another deadline for an agreement looms Dec. 1.
The whole enterprise, and the constant bickering and questions, had coaches wondering aloud this week: Was moving to nine games really worth it?
"Now, you could say there may be regret in there going to nine," said Georgia coach Kirby Smart, who has long supported a nine-game conference schedule. "I'm not blaming the committee, I'm blaming the system, because I don't know that they can recognize and acknowledge, truly, and say strength of schedule matters and you're putting a team with one more loss in their column over a team that might have one less and they play the same schedule."
Nobody trusts the math
The college football world revolves around the decisions of 13 humans, and no one is convinced the SEC will get the benefit of the doubt -- even with new analytics on their side. Half the league will carry an extra loss this fall by design, and it's that simple number that keeps coaches awake at night. Tennessee's Josh Heupel said the room is counting on the committee to read those losses in context.
"It's not just the last number on your win-loss column," Heupel said.
It also doesn't help that perception is sometimes reality. The Big Ten has won the last three national titles and is 15-4 against non-Big Ten teams, and the SEC is only 3-7 against non-SEC teams in the CFP during that time. Experts and pundits alike will tell you the SEC is the deepest league in the country, if not the most top-heavy, like the Big Ten.
"From a big picture, the breadth, the depth of this league, this league stands alone," SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. "In fact, we saw metrics out of the College Football Playoff presentation where there's no doubt we're the strongest league."
In a 12-team playoff, the CFP committee often finds itself comparing the resumes of teams with two and three losses. Without universal scheduling across the power conferences -- and until this year, an unequal amount of conference games -- the comparisons can turn into a beauty contest.
"So when that SEC team is 9-3 versus another conference team at 10-2, that's the great debate," Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks said. "And how we're weighing a team that could have a third loss because of a ninth conference game, where we could have stayed at eight."
To address that, the SEC proposed a new strength-of-record metric at its spring meetings a year ago. The CFP implemented the new formula in its toolbox of metrics, but the human element obviously still remains. How often committee members referenced those metrics is anyone's guess. The CFP also does not make the metrics available to the conferences during the season.
"The data won't always tell the tale," Brooks said. "Not all wins are equal."
The problem is the SEC's coaches don't trust it. The metrics aren't transparent, the weighting isn't fixed, and the people in the room -- as Smart pointed out -- carry biases that no formula can scrub out.
"You had that same bias when it was four," Smart said. "I got left out of the four several times and thought I had the best team in the country. And you didn't go cry about it, scream about it. It was what it was."
But is the SEC happy that its new strength-of-record metric was used by the committee last season? The SEC led the country with five teams in the CFP.
"I don't know that I know enough," Sankey said.
Coaches this week expressed a desire for the selection committee to include more former coaches who may better understand the value of wins in the SEC than, say, an athletic director on the committee already pulled in 100 directions on their own campus.
Four former coaches and two former players will be on the 13-person committee this season.
The silo problem: Every league for itself
The underlying issue across college sports is that conferences are motivated to improve their own standing. Last spring, Sankey was increasingly combative when asked which CFP format is best for all of college football.
Behind closed doors this week, SEC coaches spent most of their time passing their pointed questions to CFP leaders through one filter: what's best for the SEC?
Ryan Silverfield spent a decade at Memphis, a Group of Six school, before Arkansas hired him. He has stood on both sides of the velvet rope. And he walked out of the playoff session with a counterintuitive read on expansion -- one the league chewed on privately all week.
"If it went to a 16-team playoff, that's one more SEC team that would have gone in," Silverfield said. "If you went to 24, it's just weighing out one extra (team)."
In other words, the larger the CFP expands, the SEC's marginal gain shrinks while every other conference's stake grows.
"As it expands, less SEC, it gives you actually an opportunity for more Group of Six teams, more ACC teams to get in," Silverfield said. "You're allowing exponentially -- two more ACC teams, two more Big 12 teams, a handful more Big Ten teams. I don't know if the expansion is necessarily better for the SEC."
It's no secret the SEC prefers expanding to a 16-team bracket, though its coaches and ADs remain split on expanding to 24, a proposal pushed by the Big Ten since last fall. Every conference is on board with 24, but the SEC remains undecided, with a Dec. 1 deadline looming.
That silo mentality permeates every conference and spans multiple topics. From college sports legislation in Washington, D.C., to pooling media rights and expanding the CFP, conferences fight for their own interests rather than the overall health of the enterprise.
"Every commissioner's doing their job. They're fighting as hard as they can for their membership," Texas A&M athletics director Trev Alberts said. "And sometimes those are at cross purposes in terms of what's in the best interest. So how you coalesce on something that's good for the enterprise has increasingly been somewhat challenging."
Self-preservation is the primary motivation in the ACC and Big 12, which have combined for only six representatives in the CFP over the last three years. If you make the playoff party bigger, coaches are less likely to be fired. A record 33 FBS head coaching changes were made in the most recent cycle.
"If they don't make the party, they get fired," Smart said. "So then they're worried about the party, not the dilution of the market."
In the end, coaches are not policy changers. Those decisions lie with athletic directors, university presidents and conference commissioners.
"I don't know why you ask us," said Texas A&M coach Mike Elko, who reached the CFP for the first time last season. "It doesn't matter what we think. I don't know why we're trying to become a trophy sport. What does Mike Elko want? Forty (teams). Then I won't get fired."
Trophies tell the story
The pride of the SEC is so great that its rivals within the conference are fighting … for each other.
"Texas played five teams in the top 25, and another team played one team in the top 25," Oklahoma coach Brent Venables said. "They got in. Texas didn't."
At least for one afternoon, Oklahoma's coach was stating the postseason case for his biggest rival.
Still, it's the SEC fighting to make sure its access -- historically better than other leagues -- remains intact after expanding to nine conference games, a scheduling philosophy the Big Ten adopted a decade ago, and the ACC begins transitioning to this fall.
When asked why the Big Ten has surpassed the SEC in the CFP over the last three years, Sankey spent several minutes Wednesday litigating, detailing close calls dating back to the 2016 CFP that could have gone the SEC's way before admitting that, yes, the Big Ten has surpassed his conference in postseason success.
"If you look at the entirety of our league, we are by far the most competitive, the strongest football league -- by far. But you're going to lose games when it's close and competitive like that," he said. "So why have they surpassed us? It's an oddball. It's bounced a couple times the wrong way. Indiana was pretty dominant in the Rose Bowl last year [a 38-3 win against Alabama]. A lot of other games, you look, pretty close margin, and we've been the beneficiary on those. I think that if we win, you don't ask me the question."
That's the posture the SEC carries into the summer from Destin. It's certainly still strong, and many won't argue against the summation that it is the deepest conference from top to bottom, but it faces strife as the Big Ten rises in the postseason and the SEC deals with the unknown of a nine-game conference schedule.
"It's natural with all human nature – self-preservation," said Smart, the SEC's dean of coaches and disciple of Hall of Fame coach Nick Saban. "People make decisions based on what gives them the best opportunity to have success. Sometimes that's unfortunate. I've been in this conference for a long time. I've listened to coach Saban come out of these meetings a long time. It can't always be what's best for self-preservation. It has to be what's best for the game. Sometimes you'll get caught up in the middle of that."
In a world of decisive numbers, the SEC's metrics fight with the CFP doesn't have a scoreboard.
