Ask Texas football coach Steve Sarkisian any question about college football, and he'll quickly extol the virtues of his sport. The history, the pomp, the pageantry, the rivalries. Sarkisian admittedly loves it all.
But Sarkisian is also pragmatic when it comes to his duties leading the Longhorns. That means he's cautiously optimistic about the impact of the impending 24-team College Football Playoff, which will likely begin next season pending contractual agreements between the SEC, the Big Ten, other collegiate conferences and broadcast partner ESPN.
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"Opportunity is great," Sarkisian said Thursday during his weekly Zoom availability with reporters. "More teams get an opportunity to try to win a national championship."
Sarkisian then reeled off a few reasons why more teams makes more sense, especially if a squad has to deal with some adversity in an early-season loss that once ended all title hopes.
"Maybe you may have had to endure an injury or two," he said. "Maybe your quarterback was out. You get them back, and now you're healthy and you're fresh and you're better. Maybe it gives you an opportunity early in your season to play some younger players, knowing, hey, maybe we have a couple of losses that don't want to lose. But your team can get better and play your best football at the end of the year with an opportunity to make a run."
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But the devil always lies in the details, and Sarkisian wants to know the intricacies of the new system. The expanded CFP eliminates conference title games, so how will the modern conference behemoths - none of the Power Four leagues have less than 16 teams - determine conference championships and automatic playoff berths? Will a selection committee pick every CFP squad as well as its seed?
"How are you eligible? How are you not? Is it just the top 24?" Sarkisian asked. "I don't know the specifics of it. I'm a little leery of not having championship games, if that's what comes out of this."
Sarkisian does hope more high-profile nonconference games come out of any CFP expansion, since the impact of an early-season loss will no longer eliminate a team from contention. Texas has embraced that type of scheduling under Sarkisian; the Longhorns have played Ohio State and Michigan during Sarkisian's six seasons as coach, and they have a home rematch with Michigan next year as well as a home-and-home schedule with Notre Dame in 2028 and 2029.
"What I like most about (expansion), without having really dug into it, honestly, is that we get to keep those nonconference games that I think we all really like," Sarkisian said. "I know we do internally. I know our fans do. I know it's good for college football that we're playing Michigan next year and we've got Notre Dame the next two years after that. I'm excited that we get to keep those things."
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This article originally published at 'Opportunity is great.' Texas coach Steve Sarkisian explains why he likes a 24-team CFP.