The NCAA basketball tournament is a fine event but features a glut of mediocre power-conference teams (and will feature even more moving forward) that have no shot at the title, and the people running college football have looked at this and said “we’d like some of that glut action, too.”
The College Football Playoff is likely expanding to 24 teams beginning next season, giving us all something that we didn’t ask for. This will require moving the start of the season up a week, turning Week 0 into
Week 1, it will eliminate conference championship games, and ruin the last of the quality bowl games that existed outside the CFP.
The field will include the four power-league champs—or psuedo-champs, given that everyone plays an uneven schedule and the conference title games will be gone—as well as the best G6 team and 19 at-large teams. The NIL era has been helpful in adding parity to college football at the top, but are there 24 teams capable of winning a national championship in any given year? Of course not.
But now making the playoffs will be an attainable goal for the bulk of P4 programs, and coaches can extend their careers and further enrich themselves with happy-to-be-here appearances rather than the indignity of a mid-tier bowl game. Why lose to Iowa in the Citrus Bowl and get fired when you can lose to Iowa in the first round of playoffs and feel like you did something, maybe get a little raise, and make some boosters feel better about themselves? This seems to be the entire point.
Expansion will create more games with playoff implications into November, but I’m not sure this is going to enrich the experience for anyone. Are we going to feel more compelled to tune in to a game between 7-3 Auburn and Florida teams? Maybe we will. Doesn’t feel like we will. Will it lead to me stressing out more over NC State’s games whenever it potentially has a chance at playing its way into the field? Almost certainly. I hate myself for allowing that to happen already.
