GRAPEVINE, Texas (AP) — Before there will be significant changes to college football's postseason and how to determine a champion, there are plenty of options to be considered.
Conference commissioners who run the Bowl Championship Series are just getting started on that process.
"We're just trying to understand conceptually what the pieces are. ... It's at the very beginning," Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said. "While I think people have a reasonable idea on the range of what's under consideration, the study and the inspection and understanding of that range I think is going to be months in the making."
The 11 conference commissioners and Notre Dame's athletic director spent two days meeting with BCS Executive Director Bill Hancock at a hotel at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. They are scheduled to meet there again March 26.
Hancock characterized the meetings, which encompassed more than eight hours over two days, as "very, very, very productive" with great dialogue and sharing of ideas. He wouldn't get into specifics about what was discussed.
"They are determined to do what's best for the game," Hancock said. "Everything is still on the table and there will be a time when they obviously have to start taking things off the table. But that point hasn't come yet."
In a joint statement posted on Facebook even before they had emerged from their meeting room, the group said it had a self-imposed deadline of "sometime this summer" to decide what changes to propose.
The process could take much longer to get finished.
"No one really knows what the actual drop-dead date is," said long-time WAC Commissioner Karl Benson, who takes over as the Sun Belt's commissioner in April.
As Delany described it, "Nothing has been ruled out, nothing has been ruled in. ... This is going to be an extra-inning game."
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