Welcome back to the latest edition of the Audible presented by Trader Joe's.

I'm Bruce Feldman, joined as always by my colleague from the Athletic Stuart Mandel.

Stu, we got pretty big news.

We've talked a lot about expansion.

You and a colleague Andy Staples had reported back in April about the expectation that there might be a 12-team playoff.

What is the latest?

The latest is that this is moving even faster than we expected.

We knew that the commissioners were meeting in person in Chicago late next week.

And at that point, the subgroup of Jack Swarbrick, the Notre Dame AD, Bob Bowlesby from the Big 12, Greg Sankey from the SEC, and Craig Thompson from the Mountain West was expected

to present their recommendation to the larger group that ended up happening

today as we're recording this on Thursday. As Nicole Auerbach confirmed, it is officially

the recommendation of that working group that the playoff moved to 12 teams. And an interesting

wrinkle, we always thought it would be Power 5 automatic births plus

a group one for the highest ranked group of five champ.

But at least their recommendation, and it's just a recommendation, would be to just say

six highest ranked conference champions, which means theoretically, if two group of five

champs finished higher

than the PAC 12 or the ACC champ, then they would get it too, which is a, you know, if that's

true, to me, the most dramatic thing of the whole thing is what that does for the group of five

after all these years of not having any real access to possibly have access for more than one

yeah i mean look it i don't think it necessarily has to be an eight and five conference champ that

wins i mean we've seen plenty of examples where you could have a team that is that is nine and four

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