College athletics directors and conference commissioners are working through a rainbow of crucial matters impacting the future of sports.

There’s the micro and macro data to refine, so to speak.

On-field matters and off-field structure.

One that crosses over is the future of college football scheduling and how it relates to postseason structures.

It’s all connected.

The eternal flame of eight-versus-nine-game SEC football conference schedules got a splash of gas in the league’s recent summit with Big Ten counterparts in New Orleans. Talk of adding the ninth conference game to the current eight-game format was revived after the league on a few occasions kicked the can down the road.

Revived conversations centered around reconstructing how the College Football Playoff selected its participants.

Alabama athletics director Greg Byrne has always participated actively in these debates, which was especially true last December. Adding another conference game after the Crimson Tide narrowly missed the newly-expanded 12-team playoff didn’t sound like a priority to Byrne at the time.

The Crimson Tide had just lost the final spot to an SMU team that hadn’t played as rigorous a schedule, so adding another game against the nation’s deepest league over the past few decades didn’t sound appealing.

Not under the current structure of playoff-team selection.

Byrne spoke to a small group of reporters Monday at the Birmingham Tip-Off Club on a few different topics. The eight- versus nine-game football schedule was among them.

“All I’ll say is that we’ve scheduled a two Power Four, whatever you want to call it, non-conference games starting next year,” Byrne said. “We have Florida State, Wisconsin (next season), we did that in mind of having eight conference games. So nothing has been decided one way or the other. And you know, we’ll, we’ll probably have another discussion here, I’m guessing this spring or two and see where we land with it.”

The 2026 Alabama schedule has three non-conference games under contract with a road game at West Virginia and home dates with Florida State and South Florida. That would be the season where a still-to-be-determined new College Football Playoff structure has the potential to upend a lot of philosophies behind schedule-making.

Under proposals reportedly made by the SEC and Big Ten, each of those leagues would automatically get four teams into a bracket expanded to 14 or 16 total participants. That would, conceivably, take the conference versus conference battle less of a subjective decision for a committee that, in Byrne’s mind, didn’t account for the strength of schedules.

“Not all schedules,” Byrne said again Monday, “are created the same.”

So if the battle for the spots is more internal, there’s less resistance to adding another conference game since it wouldn’t be a question of SEC cannibalizing its seat at the table.

Asked Monday if the automatic qualifiers were a must for the SEC to move to nine games, Byrne was diplomatic.

“I think there’s a way to get to nine,” Byrne said. “We’ll see if it makes sense for the conference as a whole. We’re one vote in there, but again, we’ve scheduled as though we were playing off playing eight conference games.”

Decisions like this aren’t as simple as playoff math.

There’s the matter of value for season ticket holders that are paying more and more for the right to attend games. Dropping a low-interest non-conference game against an FCS or lower-level FBS team in favor of another SEC game would add value to the packages with spiking price tags around the league and nation starting this fall.

Adding the P4 non-conference games were part of that thought process for Alabama. Even if the SEC added a ninth game, there’s still room for each non-conference game Alabama’s contracted to play through 2035.

But will there be the desire to play so many high-profile, high-intensity regular-season games without the relative break a lower-level visitor currently provides?

Alabama’s game contracts with non-conference teams currently include provisions that deal with cancelation of games in the event of conference scheduling shifts but it’s unclear how they’d apply to each individual scenario. There are also buy-out fees required should one team back out for anything outside of the specific language surrounding cancellations.

Where Alabama has at least two non-conference games scheduled every year through 2034, Auburn has been less active in filling future calendars. It has a home-and-home in 2025 and 2026 with Baylor and another with Miami in 2029 and 2030. Otherwise, its schedules are open outside of FCS games with Missouri State in 2027 and North Alabama in 2028, according to FBSchedules.com.

For Byrne, the Alabama AD wasn’t throwing his public support behind any potential CFP expansion format while still beating the strength of schedule drum.

“I don’t have a strong opinion right now,” Byrne said Monday. “I think the expansion to 12 was good for opportunities and gives fan bases hope. I also, I’ve said this publicly. I know one of the main parameters when the CFP was formed was strength of schedule and I still think that’s something we need to pay attention to.”

He said he’s seen schools come out publicly saying they don’t see the incentive to add challenging non-conference games if it could come back to bite them with a selection committee counting losses without accounting for the strength of those opponents.

“Well, that’s not good for college football,” Byrne said. “It’s not good for the fan bases. It’s not good for the young men on the teams. We all know here in Alabama there’s a lot of excitement when it comes to some of those games and, and I think that’s good for the health of the game of college football.

“And, but at the same time too, that needs to be recognized and not have it be two versus three losses, one versus two losses, whatever that looks like, as the deciding factor.”

So, bottom line: We’ll see.

But that’s at least one powerful SEC athletic director’s view on where things stand on scheduling philosophies as they stand in early March of 2025.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.