George Kliavkoff realizes where CFB Playoff negotiations faltered

The people in the room who were negotiating how to expand the College Football Playoff from four teams to 12 made a fundamental mistake.

That’s not our opinion. It’s the view of Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff, who explained the error in a recent interview with Nicole Auerbach of The Athletic:

Here’s what I would say about CFP experiences. I think that there are five things that need to happen, and they have to happen in a certain sequence. No. 1 is we’ve committed to each other to collectively agree on the 365-day calendar for college football and its rules. That is a process that started the last time the CFP met and there’s been work done by all of the conferences in the interim. That is a conversation that we’re going to pick up and I hope make tremendous progress on next week in Park City. Once you figure that out, I think No. 2 is you’ve got to do the work related to what the format looks like, and particularly what the (automatic qualifiers) look like. My impression is that people are really, really OK with the format that was proposed, and now we’re really talking about what the AQs look like. No. 3 is revenue split. No. 4 is protecting the three contract bowls (the Rose, Sugar and Orange). And No. 5 is announcing it.

What we did wrong last year is we put No. 5 first before we took care of the open issues. We have a process to go through. I think we can be done with the first one by the beginning or middle of the football season.