This is an opinion column.

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SEC commissioner Greg Sankey might have caved under pressure once, but he can’t afford to let it happen again.

Sankey needs to stay strong about the new playoff format. His league should get at least four teams in the College Football Playoff every year when the postseason tournament expands to 16 seeds.

Let’s be clear, though. Alabama didn’t get snubbed last season despite all the posturing going on at the beach this week.

The SEC bubble gets pretty thick at its spring meetings every year, but nothing can insulate the league to the changes that are here for college football. We saw a glimpse last year, and it wasn’t pretty for one of the traditional kings. Alabama lost its legendary coach and then lost to Vanderbilt.

So, no, the Tide wasn’t unfairly left out of anything.

Had there been a 16-team playoff in 2024, Alabama arguably wouldn’t even have been good enough to make that either. It wasn’t the fourth-best team in the SEC. That spot belonged to Ole Miss, which also was left moaning about missing the new 12-team playoff.

Do people suddenly have amnesia about the 2024 season? Did Kirby Smart stay in the sun a little too long before talking to reporters on Tuesday?

Kirby said that Ole Miss, Alabama and South Carolina should have all made the playoffs in 2024. That would have put six teams from the SEC in the 12-team field of a tournament won easily by Big Ten bully Ohio State.

I love Kirby, and he’s great for the SEC, but someone needs to remind him that South Carolina could only score 17 points against Illinois in its also-ran bowl game.

Georgia, meanwhile, scored just 10 points against Notre Dame in the quarterfinals of the CFP.

The posturing is a bit too much. SEC football might still be the best in the country, but the league has something to prove this fall.

Make no mistake, though. If a team loses three games in the regular season, then that team is going to have a tough time making a 16-team playoff, too.

Is the point of expanding the playoffs to get more mediocre SEC teams into the field? Alabama only managed three points on the road against Oklahoma last season. No one can convince me that a team, which got worse and worse as the season progressed, deserved a shot at the playoffs.

Was it an isolated down year for the SEC, or are the new economics of college football going to continue leveling the playing field for desperate schools like Indiana and SMU?

Will the SEC continue to lose power amid all of college football’s chaos, and is that a good thing for the long-term value of the sport?

Those are the big-picture questions here for Sankey and the Boys ahead of the 2025 season.

More changes are coming, too.

Call it serendipity. Call it a touch of irony. Call it poetic. This week, with all the SEC’s power brokers assembled in Sandestin, the legal resolution of House v. NCAA is finally expected to be handed down by U.S. Judge Claudia Wilken.

Some are saying that House v. NCAA changes everything. I’m beginning to have my doubt. Schools must now share revenue with their players, but how is that going to affect the competitive balance of college football? That’s what fans really want to know.

If the settlement wraps up in time, schools will begin paying players on July 1. To regulate this new world, college football’s leaders are creating a new governing body, the College Sports Commission. The new commissioner will be announced soon.

Will this new commission and the House v. NCAA legal settlement make college football a better version of itself? Depends on the perspective.

The potential problem with House v. NCAA is that it won’t do enough to curb the inherent corruption of college football. For the SEC, maybe that’s a good thing.

Boosters in the SEC are still going to find a way to pay for the best players.

Sounds like full-on pro sports to me.

If Sankey wants to keep the SEC atop its college football pedestal, he should be fighting for as many guaranteed spots in the College Football Playoff as possible.

That would have, at the very least, landed Ole Miss in the 2025 CFP. As for Alabama, let’s just hope they’ve spent their money wisely.

BE HEARD

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Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of the book “We Want Bama: A Season of Hope and the Making of Nick Saban’s Ultimate Team.”