The cold war between the Big Ten and the SEC is heading to South Florida.

As College Football Playoff executives prepare for their annual meeting ahead of the national championship game in Miami, the sport's two power brokers remain locked in a standoff over the future of the postseason, which could leave the playoff frozen in its current format for at least one more season.

But behind the scenes, the Big Ten is floating a compromise it believes could potentially break the stalemate as the clock nears midnight on the CFP's Jan. 23 deadline for a decision.

The conference prefers a 24-team playoff, with or without automatic qualifiers, but is willing to temporarily accept a 16-team field if the rest of the sport commits to expanding to 24 teams within three years, industry sources told CBS Sports.

The stopgap would buy conferences time to unwind one of the sport's most complicated obstacles: conference championship games, which are tied up in lucrative and overlapping media-rights agreements through at least the end of the decade. The belief is that power conferences would eliminate their conference championship games in the new model.

That idea could surface Sunday when the CFP management committee, composed of the 10 FBS commissioners and Notre Dame's athletic director, meets in Miami.

For now, the lines are firmly drawn, and the Big Ten is standing on an island.

The ACC, Big 12 and SEC continue to back a 16-team "5+11" format that guarantees automatic bids to the five highest-ranked conference champions. The roadblock remains the Big Ten and SEC's controlling interest in CFP decision-making. If the two largest conferences don't align, the playoff stays at 12 teams. ESPN, the CFP's media partner through 2032, granted executives in November a deadline extension from Dec. 1 to Jan. 23 to decide on next year's format, but they have made little headway in negotiations.

The Big Ten has also explored a different version of a 24-team playoff -- one with just one automatic qualifier reserved for the highest-ranked Group of Six champion with the remaining 23 teams seeded strictly by CFP Rankings. The thinking is that a largely open field could entice the SEC, though the proposal has not been formally presented, sources familiar with the Big Ten's thinking told CBS Sports.

"There's no momentum to expand just for the sake of expanding," a power conference executive told CBS Sports. "There's this notion that college sports are really good about being reactionary and taking a short-term gain and not looking at the long-term implications of it."

The Big Ten previously discussed a 24-team field with four automatic qualifiers for each of the four power conferences, which was socialized with the FBS members. The ACC and Big 12 have long requested equal access, including qualifiers, for every power conference. A 16-team format with unequal AQs -- four for the Big Ten and SEC, and two for the ACC and Big 12 -- did not gain traction last spring and summer.

Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said in October that he would be open to discussing a 24-team field "if we're on equal footing with our colleagues." ACC commissioner Jim Phillips continues to support a 16-team format with equal automatic qualifiers or the 5+11 model, which gained momentum among SEC coaches and athletic directors last summer.

A 24-team playoff with equal access across the power conferences could still tempt SEC executives, several of whom were open to the idea in the fall. One Big Ten concept would include 16 on-campus games across the first two rounds, with eight byes awarded to the highest-ranked teams.

Quarterfinals and semifinals would remain at marquee bowl sites -- including the Fiesta, Peach, Sugar, Orange and Cotton bowls -- while an expanded neutral-site slate could pull lower-tier bowls into the playoff ecosystem. An increase from seven to 11 neutral-site games would suddenly make the idea of a Pop-Tarts Bowl playoff game plausible.

What is losing momentum is replacing conference championship games with playoff play-ins.

"Why add another wear-and-tear game on our players?" a power conference executive told CBS Sports.

A 16-team field, however, could increase the need for play-in games in a world without conference championship games.

One version of a 24-team playoff would propose moving the Army vs. Navy Game from the second Saturday in December to the first Saturday, which is typically reserved for conference championship games. The 24-team playoff would begin on the second Friday and/or Saturday of December.

The ACC entered last week hopeful that a 16-team expansion could still be approved for next season, but Phillips acknowledged that disagreements leading into the 11th hour may prevent that outcome.

"We're doing it collaboratively, and I have really enjoyed our conversations," Phillips told CBS Sports on Friday. "There's not friction and people yelling at each other. It's very professional and cordial, but it's direct. We know college football is dependent on us to come up with something that makes sense. "

Complicating matters is that the CFP hasn't held a format steady long enough to truly evaluate it.

The playoff expanded from four teams to 12 in 2024. Straight seeding was implemented in 2025. New metrics pushed by the SEC were added to the selection committee's toolbox this fall. Next fall, the ACC and SEC will increase league games from eight to nine, joining the Big Ten and Big 12's models. Simply put, meaningful long-term data points remain scarce.

The biggest controversy of the new era was the CFP Selection Committee's decision to drop Notre Dame from the top 12 in December, prompting the program to opt out of a lower-tier bowl game.

"Twelve, like it or not, has worked last year and this year, especially when the seeding was figured out this year after last year's debacle," a an executive said. "It's been proven there's enough quality teams built into the current format that 12 is probably as good of a threshold right now with the current way we do things."

For now, as they have done for the better part of two years, the conferences will likely continue to agree to disagree, leading to at least one more season of a 12-team playoff.