Shane Beamer Discusses Pros and Cons of CFP Expansion at SEC Media Days

Everything South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer said at the 2025 SEC Media Days.

The 2025 college football season is right around the corner, and a sign of that is SEC Media Days kicked off this week on Monday in Atlanta, GA at the College Football Hall of Fame. South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer took the podium Monday morning, and he discussed the pros and cons of the college football playoff potentially expanding.

"I'm all for expansion to give more teams opportunities. I wanted to make sure -- we have the greatest regular season in any sport in college athletics in my opinion," Beamer said. "Every regular season game means something. You want to make sure that the regular season doesn't lose meaning, and confident that it won't, if we expand. It'll still make a lot more games meaningful in the month of November. And then gives more teams opportunities to go compete for a championship, which is what everybody wants. We went into the last weekend last year against Clemson, Thanksgiving weekend, and not just us, but there were a lot of teams around the country that felt like they still had an opportunity to get into that 12-team playoff."

Beamer and his Gamecocks certainly would have appreciated an expanded playoff last season as they were just on the cut off line of the 12-team playoff in 2024. As Beamer mentioned though, a potential con of that would be more leeway for teams to make the playoff.

A discussion of the playoff moving to 16 teams have already begun and it seems like that is the direction the sport is heading. Many college football fans, however, likely share the same sentiment as Beamer in the sense they want the regular season to continue to hold more weight than maybe in other sports.