Missouri Coach Eliah Drinkwitz Has a Better Idea for CFP Expansion. He Says the Committee Already Muffed It.

Eliah Drinkwitz showed up to SEC Media Days on Monday and wasted no time picking a fight with the College Football Playoff committee. The Missouri head coach didn’t just offer an opinion on expansion. He claimed his original idea got mangled by somebody else and he wants the record straight.

“I was one of the first to come up with a certain idea, and somebody totally screwed it up,” Drinkwitz said, according to Seth Emerson of The Athletic. “I am not for giving the committee more opportunities to put teams in the Playoff. As nice as I can be about it, committees are a bad idea.”

The CFP started in 2014 with four teams. It jumped to 12 for 2024. Now the buzz is all about going bigger. A 24-team format keeps getting floated around. Drinkwitz thinks the whole thing is being handled wrong.

His plan would keep conference championship games exactly where they are. The winner of each title game gets an automatic bid. Then each conference runs its own play-in tournament to fill out the rest of the bracket. Under his vision, the Big Ten and SEC would each send eight teams to those play-in games. The ACC and Big 12 would get four apiece.

“I think each conference should have play-in games that create the opportunity to get into the playoffs,” Drinkwitz said. “That’s how I see it — I think it would create more excitement avenues for your fans to be excited. I think if the top eight teams in your conference had an opportunity to play in the playoffs, that gives you a measuring stick for each fan base that makes sense.”

A 24-team playoff would almost certainly mean the death of conference championship games. At least that’s what a lot of people assume. But Drinkwitz isn’t ready to let them go. He made that very clear.

“Conference championships are important and need to be preserved,” Drinkwitz said. “They’re highly entertaining. They’re highly valuable from a monetary standpoint. And they’re highly valuable from the fan engagement standpoint. So throwing those away so we get a bad matchup between 24 and 18 doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

Mizzou opens the season on September 3 against Arkansas-Pine Bluff. The schedule is a gauntlet after that: Florida, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma. Even if the playoff expands and Drinkwitz’s play-in model gets adopted, the Tigers are probably looking in from the outside. Which might be exactly why he’s so focused on giving more teams a path and more fans a reason to care.