Bob Bowlsby cannot recall what he scribbled on the outside of the envelope—A bracket? A scenario? A ranking?—but he believes it to be something of significance.

Otherwise, why would he keep it?

The envelope is somewhere, likely buried in a filing cabinet or tucked into a box, alongside other hand-scribbled notes that Bowlsby took during his two years of meetings as a member of the College Football Playoff working group—the one that explored and eventually proposed an expansion of the four-team playoff to 12.

Bowlsby, the Big 12 commissioner, is preserving these precious, historic documents to one day, years from now, unearth them in a dramatic way, as evidence of a process that will likely result in a sea change in college athletics.

For now, Bowlsby snickers, no one will get their hands on them.

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“I know I have something on the back of an envelope somewhere,” he mutters.

If Bowlsby did reveal his notes, they’d tell quite a tale: how four college athletics executives spent two years, in secret, covertly meeting at airport hotels while using masking tape to cover conference room walls with drawn-up brackets, to create an expanded playoff model that they publicly released last week.

If Bowlsby’s notes could talk, they’d tell you that the working group of three commissioners—Bowlsby, Greg Sankey (SEC) and Craig Thompson (Mountain West)—and one athletic director, Jack Swarbrick (Notre Dame), examined nearly 100 playoff models, one of which even included a 24-team bracket.

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