The rubber stamps stayed packed away on Tuesday.
University leaders, once expected to wield them to expand the College Football Playoff, had already scrapped their trips to a Hilton hotel near Chicago. Instead, after top leagues spent the summer undercutting one another, the playoff’s future remained in flux on the very day some had hoped would include college sports’ equivalent of a treaty signing.
Just how long the playoff’s direction will be unsettled is difficult to predict. The hunch among many executives, though, is that the most probable outcome is the one they have been contemplating for months: expansion, eventually.