Hogs Need Friendly Neighborhood Ryan Silverfield Rather Than Avengers Level Version

To help people have a relative perspective as to where Arkansas coach Ryan Silverfield fits in the college football world at the moment, perhaps the best correlation would Spiderman.

No, not the one who was zipping around space trying to stop Thanos with Iron Man, nor the one trying to deal with high tech super suits and glasses once he's left to try and eventually fill Tony Stark's shoes. No, the version of Spiderman reflecting Silverfield is the one way back in Captain America: Civil War who is meeting Stark for the first time and dealing with the overwhelming excitement of being asked to help at least a portion the Avengers.

When the new Arkansas coach meets with SEC commissioner Greg Sankey in a couple of weeks at the annual spring meetings, he will be the version of Spiderman that will be unsure as to whether Sankey is trying to give him a welcoming hug or just reaching across to unlock the door to the car so Silverfield can get out.

He's looking to be a "Friendly Neighborhood" Spiderman. He wants to look out his office window and do all he can to make life on the blocks he is able to see as good as possible.

It's a world of changing light bulbs in meeting rooms, making sure there is someone who knows how to order the jerseys and cleats for the upcoming season, determining whether KJ Jackson can run Tim Cramsey's favorite play to perfection while also trying to remember the name of Jackson's mother, and driving around the state figuring out where certain towns are and how much damage has been done in making the residents of these towns no longer care about the football team.

Meanwhile, what he hasn't truly processed while making sure the social media team has a few extra cameras available is that he is now a part of something bigger, dramatically bigger, than what he experienced at Memphis. He's now a head coach in the SEC, an organization bent on shaping the future of college football in the image it prefers.

The words uttered by its coaches and athletics directors matter and shake the sports landscape. If Sankey says into a microphone there is going to be an expansion of the College Football Playoffs, then it happens.

If Georgia head coach Kirby Smart stands behind a podium and says he is against a 16-team format that offers four automatic qualifier spots for the SEC and Big Ten; two each for the ACC and Big 12; one for all the remaining conferences; and three at-large selections, poof, they are gone. If he, instead, favors going all-in on at-large bids, then that's the direction the discussion will go with the qualifiers officially scrapped.

Meanwhile, Silverfield admitted on the first day of his tour of Arkansas that he just wants to get to the meetings, be told the parameters of the world in which he is about to compete, and then get back to Fayetteville so he can continue to focus on his neighborhood. He doesn't want to put a lot of research and thought into a well-formed opinion on the playoffs when he's trying to repair his newly acquired home after a 2-10 fire destroyed the place.

"I've got enough things right now that I'm dealing with on our own front porch, dealing with the wealth, expense," Silverfield said at the Fayetteville stop. "Whatever they decide to do, hey, great. So be it. If they decide to shrink [the College Football Playoff], they decide to expand it, whatever the heck that looks like. We'll be all for it and we'll put our head down and go to work."

And he might be able to do exactly that, but at some point he will need to be able to do more than look at a sheet of paper with the official company line and recite it. The SEC is built upon the bold.

The question is going to come. The only concern is whether he will know all the details because there's a lot.

First off, Sankey is going to do all he can to support ESPN because that's who cuts the checks around the SEC. That's why he's the sole outlier fighting for a 16-game playoff right now. Back in January it look like he had won the war.

Only the SEC and Big Ten can decide the future of college football and its playoff system by way of highjacking the sport with a threat to take their ball elsewhere. All the other conferences caved and hoped they might catch what might blow off the giant stacks of cash the two conferences load into their bank accounts each year.

So, at the turn of the year, Sankey had all the rest of college football convinced the next logical step was to move to a 16-team model that would allow lucrative conference championship games to remain in place while not cheapening the regular season.

Everyone was on board for the most part until the Big Ten asked these other schools to check their bank accounts after the final NIL payments went out. Programs were not only struggling to keep up, many were basically bankrupt. They needed a big influx of money, including a school like Arkansas, but Silverfield wasn't available to get involved in such discussions.

He was still trying to figure out whether he had a full contingent of players at the time. Rather quickly, Big Ten commissioner Tony Pettiti flipped every non-SEC school in some capacity.

The Fox-backed league had everyone else on board for a 24-game playoff that would allow for the elimination of conference championship games and stuff cash in school's pockets on top of the lost revenue from those title games.

Soon the season was shrinking as college football looked for a way to make it all work. A bye week deleted here, a more robust Week 0 added there. Subtract the conference championship game and don't forget to carry the Army-Navy game to its lone spotlight in December per presidential executive order and boom, there's a football season.

Not only is there a football season, but it's most likely sponsored in part by Fox, something Sankey is strongly against. That's because ESPN can barely handle the 12-game playoff.

Despite its CFP contract saying Disney is set up to easily handle up to 14 teams, ESPN had to farm out games at just a dozen entrants.

In 2025 ESPN sublicensed the Ole Miss-Tulane and James Madison-Oregon games to HBO Max, TNT, TBS and tru TV. Numerous future playoff games have already been farmed out as well.

With ESPN seemingly maxed out, there is all the room in the world for the Big Ten to strong arm schools into agreeing Fox should carry the additional playoff games that would suddenly come available, further weakening the SEC both in college athletics political power and on the financial front.

The SEC is already struggling under NIL as it has closed the gap between the facilities and tradition rich programs grown in the midst of some of the best football recruiting grounds ever built by the Lord God Himself and the other schools. Suddenly it's about the check in a lot of cases rather than the prestige and shiny toys in and out of the locker room.

As a result, the SEC's stranglehold on the sport has dwindled. The conference that once dominated to a point where it was a matter of which SEC team would beat another SEC team for the championship has given way to an era of Big Ten rule on the field.

2025: Indiana (CFP)
2024: Ohio State (CFP)
2023: Michigan (CFP)
2022: Georgia (CFP)
2021: Georgia (CFP)
2020: Alabama (CFP)
2019: LSU (CFP)
2018: Clemson (CFP)
2017: Alabama (CFP)

The SEC no longer runs the playoffs, and if Sankey can't pursuade his colleagues to flip back to his side, the conference will also literally no longer run the playoffs. The awe of college football's greatest conference will be officially gone.

So, Silverfield will have his marching orders. Even though the 24-team version would have been best for his program at Memphis and is the only hope he will ever have of squeezing into the back end of the pack at Arkansas, he will need to do what is best for Sankey's mission rather than his program.

It's something his predecessors dealt with last year that makes his life much harder for Silverfield and his colleagues this upcoming season. Despite there being no visible gain to adding a ninth SEC game to the schedule, Sankey was convinced it would allow for an extra team or two in the playoffs and a minor increase in yearly TV revenue.

It certainly did nothing to help get borderline SEC teams into the playoff. It hurt them, and it's going to hurt Silverfield as he tries scratch together wins with an extra game against Georgia or Texas A&M rather than a game against, uh, (checks notes) . . . Memphis.

Nevermind. It probably wouldn't have made much of a difference this year, but next season when a road trip to Athens replaces a home game against Louisiana Tech or UTEP in a season that reaches the 5-5 mark before ultimately rolling over to 5-6 instead of 6-5, it will matter, and the others know it.

First off, they thought Sankey was going to deliver on the 16-team field last year.

“The expectation of every athletics director in the SEC was that at some level, the nine-game schedule was going to be combined with at least a 16-team CFP field,” Auburn athletics director John Cohen told AL.com after it became clear the 12-team format was moving forward.

“I would’ve said no,” Ole Miss chancellor Glenn Boyce reportedly told 247Sports in frustration after realizing he had saddled his coach with a much more difficult game for no benefit.

So, now Silverfield is stuck needing to navigate an extra SEC game while also contemplating whether regular students should be involved in the tryout to fill the spot held by punter Connor Smith before his season-ending injury, or if it should just be a cattle call of every player on the team other than maybe the quarterbacks punting the football one after the other.

It's probably best that Silverfield continues to be the "friendly neighborhood" Spiderman rather than the Avengers level version of the character Tom Holland briefly becomes as the world around him spirals out of control to the point he literally loses everything he worked so hard to have in his life.

Otherwise, he might wake up one day seeing his SEC approved comments coming back to haunt him.

"This new agreement solidifies the broadcast future of the College Football Playoff for many years to come," said Mississippi State University president Mark Keenum said in regard to the last ESPN contract that was supposed to stabilize the sport until at least a few years into the 2030s.

For now, let Smart and Steve Sarkisian do all the Avengers level fighting on behalf of the SEC. The streets of Fayetteville need a defensive back who can protect the citizens from the negative outcomes brought on by the double move.

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