So, what’s your favorite season of the 12-team College Football Playoff? Was it the 2024 season, or will it be 2025?
Those look like your only options right now. There’s long been speculation about the CFP expanding to 14 or 16 teams as early as 2026, with the Big Ten and SEC slowly beating the drum of automatic bids for their leagues over the last year. It seems we’re closer to that becoming a reality. According to Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports, it’s a matter of when, not if, we see a further expanded field that will include four automatic berths for both the Big Ten and SEC.
As for the rest of the conferences: the ACC and Big 12 will likely each get two auto bids, with the top Group of Five champion and Notre Dame (provided the latter finishes ranked high enough) rounding out the field. If you’re good at math, you may notice that adds up to 14 teams! That means if the CFP expands to 14, there may be some seasons in which it doesn’t include a single at-large team.
Notre Dame, by the way, has finished outside the top 14 of the final CFP Rankings five times (2014, 2016, 2019, 2022, 2023) since they were introduced in 2014.
Other details need to be ironed out, too, like how the expanded field will impact conference championship games and where the games will be played. However, I’m sure the Big Ten and SEC will let us all know what decisions they make along the way, and I bet they’ll give the other leagues a heads up before going public.
But while this change is one that seems to rankle a lot of college football fans, it’s ironically one of the few things about this whole debacle I find appealing.
I don’t like the expanded playoff at all. I watch the games, and they’re fun, but I don’t think it’s the best way to determine the national champion, nor do I buy that it leads to more meaningful games during the regular season. But I know I’ve lost that battle. I’d have better luck standing on the beach yelling at the tide to go back out because eventually it will, and I can feel like I accomplished something.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told Yahoo that while a final format isn’t decided upon yet, “It needs to be a true championship, not artificial and not an invitational.”
Well, Jim, I have awful news for you. The College Football Playoff has never been anything but an invitational. Putting the word “playoff” in there doesn’t make it one.
In every single professional sport, the playoffs are decided by a set of parameters a team must meet based on their divisions and overall records. That’s not the case in college football, nor in college basketball (where it’s called the NCAA Tournament, not the NCAA Playoff, because wording matters). Unfortunately, in a sport with 134 teams that can’t be forced to play more than one game per week, there is no way to conduct a “true championship.” We’re forced to make do with what we have.
By setting guidelines for auto-bids by conference — fair or not — we at least have some semblance of an actual playoff. Every single team enters the year knowing exactly what they need to accomplish to get into the field. It’s not up to a room of administrators who have far too many other responsibilities in their day-to-day lives to be trusted to pick the “best” 8-4 team.
The other positive side effect is how it will impact regular-season scheduling. With automatic bids and less reliance on impressing a selection committee, the SEC will likely expand to a nine-game conference schedule like the Big Ten and Big 12 already play, per Yahoo. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ACC follows suit. In the era of bloated conferences, more conference games are a good thing because they keep some semblance of consistency in who you play. Familiarity breeds contempt, and contempt leads to ratings, after all!
If it were up to me, each league would play a 10-game conference schedule. That’s not likely to happen, but we do get something similar in the likely changes. Not only will the SEC likely go to a nine-game schedule, but it could have a scheduling agreement with the Big Ten. While the Big Ten having 18 schools to the SEC’s 16 throws a minor wrench in there, it’s still an agreement that would be good for fans as well as the television networks broadcasting the games because it would increase the number of marquee matchups on the schedule every season.
Perhaps it’s due to being beaten down by the drastic changes to the sport in such a short period of time, but for the moment, I’ll take what I can get. Now, if the even larger College Football Playoff tells the bowls to kick rocks and starts playing at least every round up until the semifinals on campus, I may even celebrate it.
