The Pac-12 collapsed on a Friday. By the next Tuesday, commissioner Greg Sankey was already eyeing more leverage for the SEC in the newly expanded College Football Playoff.

During an interview with Paul Finebaum of the SEC Network, Sankey indicated that the automatic bids coming to the College Football Playoff in 2024 need to be “reconsidered.”

Translation? That sounds a lot like Sankey-speak for further rigging the system to favor the league who employs him.

I’m ready for football to start. The weather before this week was hotter than Nick Saban having to talk about quarterbacks. It’s starting to feel agreeable again. Even Saban is smiling these days. The taste of football is in the air. First, though, there is something that needs to be considered.

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On August 30, commissioners of college football will meet to discuss the business of the College Football Playoff. The liquidation of the Pac-12 will be one of the topics. USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington are off to the Big Ten after this season. Arizona State, Arizona and Utah are leaving for the Big 12. It’s ugly stuff and there are some nasty details to be sorted out. Sankey wants to know what’s going to happen to the automatic bid to the playoffs that was supposed to be reserved for the Pac-12.

Before trying to game the system in the wake of so much chaos, Sankey and the other commissioners first need to ask themselves a more important question. What do they want college football to be?

The SEC wields great power these days and it should. The reason for that is because of the South’s devoted football fans. They’re the best in the country and they drive the sport. Should the SEC have even more power to determine the fate of college football? It’s not hard to imagine what they think about that idea at Stanford and Oregon State.

Do the Sankeys of the college football world want the sport to be a predictable, minor-league version of the NFL? Do they want to completely dismantle college football and start over? Do they want to engineer more parity into the game and help foster interest for teams outside of their leagues?

Critical moments are approaching for an enterprise that is so much more than a sport.

The future of college football is like one of those old adventure books. The Sankeys of college football can flip to page 43 to choose the path of SEC-Big Ten corporate college football domination. Flipping to page 57, meanwhile, might put college football on a road to a more inclusive future.

In 2024, the College Football Playoff will expand to 12 teams. There will be six automatic qualifiers and six at-large bids. The auto bids will go to the league champions of the six highest ranked conferences. The 6-6 model would have all but ensured a spot in the playoffs for the five major conferences and one Group of 5 conference.

With the Pac-12 decimated, the argument now becomes what to do with that extra automatic bid. There has been discussion of a 5-7 model, meaning just five automatic qualifiers to the College Football Playoff. There has been discussion of completely starting over and giving 12 bids to the 12 highest ranked teams in the country. What do the people who run college football want the sport to be?

I don’t know what the future holds for college football, but I do know that the College Football Playoff can be a mechanism for more parity in sport. Leaving the 6-6 model in place could help leagues like the Big 12, American Athletic Conference and the Sun Belt not just have a chance to make the College Football Playoff, but a chance to survive into the future.

The best thing for college football would be a College Football Playoff that includes as many teams as possible. The NCAA Tournament features 68 teams and the leaders of college basketball are considering adding more at-large bids to the field. Wouldn’t a 24-team football playoff at least give every team in the Football Bowl Subdivision the hope of possibly making the postseason?

In sports, the beauty of hope is the fuel of competition. The unscripted drama of games is why people watch. I’m all for hope. Give me more of that. The more hope the better.

This business of parity and selection reminds me of two dueling thoughts presented by Alabama’s football coach over the course of the last year. Saban has argued in the past that controlling the money being given to athletes through NIL collectives would help the sport be more equitable for all teams. At the same, Saban has also said that Alabama should have been in the 2023 College Football Playoff because it would have been favored against three or four teams in the field.

Saban wants what’s best for Alabama, so it’s OK for him to be biased, but why play the games at all if the teams people subjectively think are the best should be in the playoff? That’s not what playoffs are about. No one in Alabama thought San Diego State was going to make the Final Four earlier this year, but it’s a guarantee that people in Southern California certainly did.

But San Diego State wasn’t even the best story of the 2023 NCAA Tournament. Everyone in the country fell in love with nine-seed Florida Atlantic, which knocked off Tennessee and Kansas State to reach the national semifinals.

FAU had hope, and that’s all the Owls needed. Shouldn’t dreams like that be protected?

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama”, a book about togetherness, hope and rum. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.