The SEC doesn't own the Playoff, but it does own something else

It's not a conspiracy. It's a story.

Greg Sankey, SEC commissioner and storyteller. © Denny Simmons/The Tennessean / USA TODAY NETWORK

This century’s dominant college football conspiracy theory is about collusion between the SEC, ESPN, and College Football Playoff selection committee. It broke contain from message boards and social media long ago, and U.S. senator Rick Scott nodded to it this week when he demanded that committee turn over "any emails, text messages or other written communication exchanged between members of the Selection Committee and individuals affiliated with ESPN.” 

The theory: ESPN (or parent Disney) owns the exclusive broadcasting rights to the Playoff. ESPN is also in business with the SEC, and getting deeper into it all the time as it makes the SEC the cornerstone of its college sports programming. Given this financial entanglement, Mickey Mouse pressures the Playoff committee to boost SEC teams (specifically Alabama), or committee members prop up the SEC on their own to curry favor with the TV sugar daddy that pays hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the right to air the games. 

I have laughed at ideas along this line. Recently: 

No laughing anymore! Florida State isn’t playing in the Playoff, and a less deserving Alabama will take its place. My opinion aged as well as a turd on a blacktop in July. 

Yet I hold strong on the frontline of a pointless army—defending an entertainment conglomerate, some bureaucrats, and college sports administrators from charges of playing dirty pool. 

There have been worse theories than that of the SECSPN-Playoff cabal. But I don’t think pro-SEC meddling from ESPN or Playoff fat cats got Bama its spot. There are too many holes: 

• The Playoff does not make more money because the SEC has a team in the field. The Playoff gets a set annual amount of money from ESPN. It’s about $470 million, which it mostly sends back to conferences. That figure does not go up or down depending on who’s in the field. Would ESPN be inclined to bid more on the Playoff in the next media-rights cycle if every game gets maximal ratings? Maybe a bit, in a vacuum. But ESPN will bid anyway to stay involved with the Playoff, and other suitors will push the price up. Sports rights are expensive, and when big companies model out big expenses years in advance, they understand that the participants in their sports TV inventory will vary. Fox CEO and real-life Succession character Lachlan Murdoch was pissed when the Rangers and Diamondbacks produced a poorly rated World Series this year, but nobody thinks Fox is going to stop paying for MLB games as a result. “That’s how the cookie crumbles,” as Murdoch put it on a recent earnings call. And Florida State has a huge fanbase anyway. In this analogy, they aren’t a small-market MLB team. Maybe Alabama is the Yankees or Red Sox, but FSU is what? The Braves? The Noles command lots of people with remote controls, as they like to remind the rest of the ACC.  

• The juice is not worth the squeeze for ESPN, either. Yeah, ESPN is about to pay the SEC billions of dollars. Yeah, ESPN would like SEC teams to remain established among the most valuable properties in sports media. Alabama not getting to play in one Rose Bowl wasn’t going to compromise that and certainly wasn’t going to compromise it enough to justify going to war with another TV partner, the ACC, and opening up a mystery box of legal exposure. ESPN cares about the SEC more than the ACC, but the Mouse would rather not get into a major fight with a conference that co-runs a TV channel with it. Because the ACC comes fairly cheap and generates pay-TV carriage fees via the ACC Network at a moment of ballooning sports rights fees and enormous losses on streaming, ESPN should care about that relationship a lot. 

• Why would the committee members participate in this scheme? Chairman Boo Corrigan is an ACC athletic director at NC State. There’s only one SEC-affiliated member on the whole committee (Kentucky AD Mitch Barnhart). Are the committee members all on the take? Do they seem cunning enough to launder kickback money?  

So, no. It’s not a conspiracy. I think what really happened is less of a caper but more instructive about how college sports work. 

The SEC has an influence machine, and it never stops. 

Why did FSU miss the Playoff? The easy (and pretty much correct) answer is that Jordan Travis broke his leg. But that injury didn’t happen in a vacuum.

If Travis broke his leg and then FSU found itself pitted against a regular ol’ 12-1 conference champ or 11-1 team from outside the SEC, would FSU have made the Playoff anyway? I’d argue yes, in a lot of cases. Imagine if the argument were between this year’s FSU and the 2022 TCU team that went 12-1 with a Big 12 title game loss. Or imagine the other team up for the fourth spot was 2021 Cincinnati, which had an unbeaten record but played in the American Athletic. The chips didn’t fall that way for FSU. They dictated that the other team in contention was Alabama. 

Is Alabama a superior team at the moment to Travisless FSU? Very likely, yes. So are a handful of teams that didn’t make the Playoff. Georgia is ranked one spot behind FSU, proving that the committee isn’t ranking teams exclusively based on theoretical point spreads. 

That means something had to be special about Alabama. The Tide had to be so much better than FSU that the committee was willing to care more about that gap in perceived quality than FSU’s unblemished record. What was that special about Alabama? The Tide would have lost a second game a week earlier if Auburn’s defense hadn’t lost its mind on fourth-and-31. Bama had a lesser resume than FSU, mainly because Bama’s contained a decisive loss to Texas. FSU also had a better result against common opponent LSU, winning by more points on a night when LSU’s Heisman-contending QB, Jayden Daniels, didn’t get injured. Alabama had a tougher slate of conference opponents, but 2023 did not present the kind of murderer’s row that Alabama might see in a different year. 

Alabama was special because it plays in the SEC and, as such, its conference title win came against the Georgia Bulldogs. Why do people think the SEC is special? Mostly for self-evident football reasons. It’s the best league in the country, and it’s not close. I don’t even think it was that close this year, when a bunch of non-conference results looked bad.

But these are marginal decisions, and the SEC is not just elite at football but at hammering a message. Greg Sankey gets more fawning coverage than any commissioner should, but one thing he’s great at is realizing the power of his bizarrely situated bully pulpit. Sankey is the commissioner of the one conference whose fans have been trained to root for the conference itself. They don’t often chant “B-1-G” at Big Ten games, after all. Sankey knows his league has a booming voice, and the SEC uses it. 

Some of that happens in the background all the time. The SEC Network exists not just for carriage fees and advertising, but to give the SEC a friendly national outlet. It’s not quite OANN covering Trump—I’ll always hold that Paul Finebaum is tougher on his subjects than he gets credit for—but it’s state media all the same, and it’s in a lot of households. The SEC has made its media days into a veritable event, and reporters flock there to hear from Sankey as much as players and coaches. 

Sankey went into overdrive in the run-up to Selection Sunday. Before the SEC title game, he went on College GameDay and lobbied without a lick of shame for both Alabama and Georgia to make the title game. “Let’s go back to Sesame Street so we’re really basic,” Sankey said. “One of these things is not like the other, and that’s the Southeastern Conference.” Sankey was not just grandstanding: He was speaking to committee members who probably watched just like millions of others. Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne worked out of a similar playbook as he messaged later through the local press corps: If Alabama were penalized for losing to Texas, why should teams like Alabama play those games at all? (The obvious answer is to satisfy a fanbase that is tired of boring nonconference games.) Sankey and Byrne are in high positions, and anyone with a similar worldview was able to follow them. 

Their message—that the SEC isn’t just better but visits from another planet—is the foundation of how the conference sells itself. That means slogans, sure, but it’s not only a matter of It Just Meaning More. When Sankey rattles cages about the SEC staging its own playoff if the rest of FBS doesn’t reach an agreeable model, he’s doing the same thing. The league was never going to do that, but doing it wasn’t the point. Reminding everyone that the SEC is special was the point, just like his spot on GameDay before Alabama beat Georgia.

We will never know how each committee member voted, much less how they got to their conclusions. But it would be weird to assume they were impervious to a well-delivered messaging campaign about the extreme specialness of the SEC. The committee members are college sports administrators, executives, and former players who mainline the same media diet as other obsessives. ESPN’s Heather Dinich cited an anonymous member who said, "All of us had the emotional tie, like, 'Holy shit, this is really going to suck to do this.’”

Travis’ injury worked against FSU, but something had to get Bama over the line. Maybe a blockbuster win over Georgia did it on its own. Maybe all of that PR work had its intended effect, too. 

While the SEC pounded the pavement, the ACC was a church mouse. 

The Seminoles were aware of exactly what might be coming. Days before Championship Weekend, FSU’s sports communications office sent out a fact sheet to national media laying out the Noles’ case against a team just like Alabama. The very first bullet point noted that since the dawn of the BCS, no unbeaten Power 5 team had ever lost a title shot in favor of a team with a loss. Dozens of facts and figures followed. 

The conference office was quieter. ACC commissioner Jim Phillips did not engage in pre-championship game lobbying, at least not in public. While Sankey was on GameDay on Saturday morning explaining how the SEC was different from everyone else, Phillips was not making noise. 

Granted, the GameDay set was on site at the SEC’s game in Atlanta, not the ACC’s in Charlotte, and that itself demonstrates the uphill battle FSU was fighting in the messaging war. 

But I have been to Charlotte. The internet access there is robust. Dozens of media members would’ve put microphones in Phillips’ face at a moment’s notice. Where was he? Phillips had nothing to say until after FSU beat Louisville. He told ESPN then, in a polite written statement: “It’s been a terrific year for FSU and the entire ACC, and we have the utmost confidence in the committee and expect FSU to be recognized as one of the four best and most deserving teams among the playoff participants.”

Did Phillips have to bark at the carnival as Sankey did on live TV? No. But his silence was curious, and it became even more so during ESPN’s game broadcast. Many Noles fans thought ESPN’s booth of Joe Tessitore and Jesse Palmer made a strong case against FSU’s inclusion throughout the night. I didn’t see it entirely that way, and in fact, Tessitore delivered an explicit case for FSU after the game. 

But to whatever extent FSU didn’t get the shake its supporters might have wanted, it’s worth asking the question: Did everyone who had a megaphone use it? And when? Phillips went fire-and-brimstone after the fact, calling FSU’s omission “unfathomable.” What did he do beforehand? The ACC boss may have seen the high road as a smart one to take. If he did, he miscalculated. 

College football is a game of perceptions, and the great ones all know it. 

Why did Bear Bryant attend sportswriting award banquets? Why does every program pay a sports information director and an entire staff under them? Why do administrators and executives stop to talk with reporters in lobbies and hotel restaurants? Why do agents leak coaching rumors? Why do head coaches and coordinators meet with the broadcasting team the day before every game? And why does Greg Sankey go to stump on GameDay the morning of his conference’s tentpole event when he could be showing up at donor brunches or meeting with his staffers when so many of them are in one place? 

Alabama made its best case on the field, but there’s a reason that Nick Saban spent time before the SEC Championship making one with words, too. It’s the same reason Kirby Smart kept plugging away at the committee during his postgame press conference, damned as he was by that point. Everything about college football, from recruiting on down, revolves in some part around the perceptions of fickle, fallible human brains. If spinning had no value, the sport’s most successful people wouldn’t do it so much. And nobody is better at making people dizzy than the league that reminds them just how much it means.