Impending playoff shift portends huge schedule shakeup for Texas A&M football

College football playoff expansion could mean Texas A&M football and rest of SEC move to 9 conference games

Though Texas A&M football fans ended up on the outside looking in this year, the expanded 12-team playoff this past season allowed Aggie fans to have realistic designs on being in the field well into November.

Indeed, for the most part, the increased size of the field was viewed as a positive across the college football landscape. There were some fans that groused about noncompetitive playoff games, but, writ large, it was considered a success.

Of course, nothing can ever stay static in this era of college football. The SEC had a case for inclusion for at least one more team, but that ended up not coming to fruition when both South Carolina and Alabama were left out.

That boosts the conference's urgency in pushing for a new model— one that it, reportedly, along with the Big 10, has wanted for a while. According to Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports, that model could be coming sooner rather than later.

Dellenger reports that the SEC and Big 10 have the power to expand the playoff, add automatic qualifiers, and more— and that they will soon be exercising that power.

No format change could take place until 2026, but it's apparently looking increasingly likely that some change will take place that year. If and when such an expansion comes to fruition, the SEC would make a "long-discussed move" to a nine-game conference schedule— something that the conference has needed to do since moving to 16.

This could be cataclysmic in the landscape of the sport, but it seems inevitable at this point. I think it is a positive overall for the Aggies, as it will expand the variety of SEC teams that the Aggies will play— and Dellenger also hints at a scheduling partnership between the SEC and Big 10 that could see A&M take on some other huge brand names they've rarely faced off with as well.