The College Football Playoff is expected to expand to twelve teams. The expansion wouldn’t start until the fall of 2023, at the earliest, and some details might still be worked out, but it sounds like it’s happening, and per the ESPN report, here’s the system:
- Six automatic bids for highest-ranked conference champions (do not need to be Power Five conference champions).
- Opening-round games in mid-December on campuses, quarterfinals and semifinals in traditional bowl games.
- No shortening of regular season.
- Highest four seeds (and first-round byes, therefore) reserved for conference champions.
- No maximum number of teams per conference.
It’s possible, of course, that there will be changes, but if there are changes, we can react to those too. Let’s react to the proposal, and let’s compare it to the current format.
Where the Twelve-Team Proposal Is Better
The proposal guarantees at least one Group of Five team will make the playoff every season, which is probably a good thing, given that while the committee’s rankings since the College Football Playoff’s inception have left the door open for a Group of Five participant, they’ve made it clear it’s going to be very difficult, and some of their rankings this season made it look like they’d moved the goalposts, which heightens the possibility that there might not be a path. There’s at least a path in the proposal. A clear, definite one.
The proposal makes the college football postseason more competitive for more teams. The non-CFP New Year’s Six Bowls were often exhibitions, or at least able to be excused as exhibitions if you were the University of Georgia. That won’t be the case anymore. We’ll get more accepted-as-big postseason games out of this.
The proposal makes more conference championships meaningful. Some will be play-in games when they previously weren’t.
The dumb debates over who’s in will be less concentrated. There’ll be more to debate—who gets byes, who gets home field, who gets in—which will at least dilute how many times we have to hear the same obscenely stupid talking points in the run-up to the field’s unveiling.
This is great for The Barking Crow. There’ll be more uncertainty, which will make our playoff model more valuable for betting while also making it relevant for more fans. There will also be more games, which will make for more big things to cover. Thank you, commissioners.
Where the Four-Team Proposal Is Better
The champion is never a joke in the four-team playoff. There have been a couple bad ones, but they’ve at least beaten up two other almost-the-best teams on the way. Most years, the twelve-team proposal will probably still give us a good champion. But allowed to run an infinite number of times, there will be a champion it’s hard to seriously call a champion. I’ve seen 9-3 Auburn thrown around as the example, and yes, that’s the best example, especially if in the example their path is something like undefeated Group of Five champion who wilts, undefeated ACC champion who didn’t play anybody, Big 12 Cinderella who’s a one-trick pony, Big Ten team who caught a couple turnovers at the right times and slogged two better teams into losing. Will this happen? Probably not. Certainly not every year. But the door is open for a messy joke that leaves nobody all that interested in the national championship (and for a lot of foregone conclusion national championships, some of which may feature teams we’re sick of watching play).
There are fewer blowouts in the four-team playoff. There are already plenty of blowouts, but without home-field advantage, with the best team limited to playing only the fourth-best team and not starting with the eighth or ninth-best team, they aren’t as extraordinarily noncompetitive as they will be. This last year, for example, three of the four quarterfinals would have been foregone conclusions as utter and complete demolitions, with the fourth an entirely underwhelming Notre Dame vs. Texas A&M matchup for the right to be mutilated by an historically good Alabama team. The opening round might be a bit better than the New Year’s Six bowls, but the quarterfinals are often going to stink.
The playoff is hard to make right now. Even Ohio State has missed it a few times. Even Alabama has missed it. Even Clemson, playing in a pushover league for most of the current format’s history, missed it the first go-round. That won’t happen anymore. Teams like those will come into the season with playoff probabilities close to 100%. Will Northwestern have a chance now? Yeah. Will UCF have a chance? Great chance, actually. But it’s not going to be every team playing for twelve spots. It’s going to be a few dozen teams playing for six to nine spots.
Every playoff contender needs to win their last game now, which won’t be the case in the other proposal. There might even be some incentives to lose. They won’t outweigh the incentives to win, but they’ll be there, and they’ll keep coaches conservative in what could well turn into a few exhibitions here and there in what used to be do-or-die games. In the proposal, if you’re stuck in the fourth or fifth spot alongside your conference championship game opponent, your incentive is to keep it close and simple, not to go all-out for a necessary win. In the proposal, if you’re a big conference championship game underdog but you’re getting in even if you lose, you have little to gain by winning besides maybe a better playoff path. You’re not pulling out all the stops.
Where We Don’t Know Which System Is Better
We don’t know what this will do to scheduling. It’s possible teams will load up on the buy games, knowing their conference slate is good-enough to get them in even if they lose once or twice. It’s possible teams will go all-out on a tough schedule, hoping playing a great team on the road will be a no-lose scenario. There are incentives to schedule big games even if they’re risky (they make money), but there are also incentives to not schedule a tough road game even if it would be no-lose were the team great (teams can fall apart, and you schedule *far* in advance in college football, raising the uncertainty).
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Personally, I think the best way to put it is that the four-team playoff is probably better for those of us who want a great champion as often as possible, and the twelve-team playoff is probably better for those who want a higher number of exciting games (though I’m not sure it will actually work out that way—I think there might be a finite amount of consequence and that Rivalry Week and conference championships may be less relevant now with the mid-December weekend on the docket). I also think people will still complain, and while it would be funny if they did it in the other direction and started hollering for the return of the BCS, I’m guessing they won’t. I’m guessing there’ll be some fun team a few years in with a couple terrible early-season losses, they won’t make the field, 8-4 Tennessee and 9-3 Florida will, and people will start hollering about the need for a 24-team playoff or how there should be a cap on the SEC, and the cycle will continue. Because the only actually-good playoff system would be one in which only teams with a legitimate claim to possibly being the national champion were invited to participate, and that is not happening in the United States of America.
12 games = more money and more women. debate closed.