Secret meetings, an important legal document & a Mississippi man’s political prowess. ByRossDellenger on how Mark Keenum & CFP presidents quietly delivered an expanded playoff
If you don’t believe it, Mississippi State University president Mark Keenum will walk to his wall of memorabilia and show you the cowbell his daddy gave him in 1973. About 14 inches in length, the maroon-painted metal noisemaker shows its age, scuffed and scarred from years of furious clanging, the metallic handle chipped and the faded white sticker on its exterior barely legible. “I’m from Bulldog country,” it reads.
Nearly 50 years after Charles Keenum gifted his 12-year-old son that cowbell, Mark, a Mississippi boy born in Starkville and raised in the 14,000-person town of Corinth, once a 230-pound center who played junior college football, captained one of theAs chairman of the College Football Playoff’s top board of executives, Keenum steered the Playoff expansion conversation this past summer before presiding over two secret fall meetings this fall and insisted during their last gathering Sept.
“If it was just up to the 11 presidents, we would get it done,” Turner says. “There’s no reason that I can see not to do it. You can’t have some local logistic issue or a bowl game not liking it [prevent] it from being implemented in 2024.”, Keenum expressed confidence in the Playoff expanding by 2024 and suggested the same in a recent call with SEC presidents. “He thinks they will get it done,” says one person on the call who requested anonymity.
In 2015, former SEC commissioner Mike Slive appointed Keenum to be the league’s representative on the CFP Board of Managers, the Playoff’s executive group of presidents. Three years later, board members elevated him to chair, one of the most powerful positions in college athletics.
In February, after five months of squabbling with one another and in meetings that at times turned into intense debate and petty bickering, commissioners failed to agree on an expanded Playoff. The unofficial vote, 8–3, needed to be unanimous to implement before the current CFP contract with broadcast rights-holder ESPN expires .Bill Hancock, executive director of the College Football Playoff, helped the organization’s Board create a subcommittee of commissioners to explore expansion models.
Keenum and the university presidents, meanwhile, held private conversations amongst themselves regarding expansion, and those talks were initiated by an unlikely person. Just weeks after his league stood against the 12-team proposal, Washington State president Kirk Schulz approached Keenum requesting that the presidents begin their own talks. Schulz, Keenum, West Virginia president E. Gordon Gee and Notre Dame president John Jenkins were the leading voices in those discussions.
Gee, a longtime proponent of expansion, told the group, “We need to get on with it,” and reminded presidents of the revenue being left on the table if expansion didn’t happen in 2024 or ’25. In the two months leading up to the Sept. 2 talks, Keenum held conversations with individual presidents, with whom he had built lasting relationships. Similar to his days on Capitol Hill, he worked the issue. As a former U.S. Senate chief of staff, he oversaw negotiations on trillion-dollar budget bills—small potatoes to an expanded Playoff. He used his experiences to maneuver positions on each side of the aisle, so to speak.
“There was another president or two looking at 16 or eight teams,” Schulz recalls. “I think the rest of the people said, ‘Do we want to be branded as our heads are in the clouds? Do we want to be chasing these rabbits?’” Mississippi State University president Mark Keenum, showing off one of his many shrines to Bulldogs sports, worked on Capitol Hill before moving to academia. Back in his office, Mark Keenum’s fandom bleeds into one of the nastiest rivalries in all of American college sports: Mississippi State vs. Ole Miss.
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