Year two of the modern College Football Playoffs is finished. No. 1 Indiana took down No. 10 Miami in a National Championship game thriller, 27-21, at Hard Rock Stadium Jan. 19. In doing so, the Hoosiers and Hurricanes confirmed that a 12-team CFP is the answer to college football’s problems.
With teams like Notre Dame and Texas being left out of the CFP this season, there is a growing movement for a larger playoffs. The Big 10 is pushing for a 24-team playoff as soon as 2029, with a 16-team playoff until then. The SEC, on the other hand, does not agree, and wants to keep it smaller than that. The two powerhouse conferences essentially control the entire situation and have a deadline this Friday to decide the future of the sport.
College football fans who desire a larger playoff directly contradict the issues that they have with the current CFP: too many mid-majors and blowouts. This year alone, Ole Miss dominated Tulane 41-10, and, despite a solid fight, Oregon handled JMU 51-34. Tulane even being in the playoffs was controversial, and anyone who didn’t support that decision has no grounds for supporting an even larger playoff.
A 24-team playoff this season would lead to three 9-4 teams making the playoff – the Iowa Hawkeyes, USC Trojans and Michigan Wolverines. Do any of those teams really deserve a spot in the CFP? They collectively went 1-2 in their bowl games.
While four teams were too few, the NCAA seems to have struck a perfect balance with 12. In 2025, the National Championship was between the seventh and eight seeds, while this season was between the first and tenth seeds. In the former format, three out of those four teams wouldn’t have even had a chance to play in the game – and each game was close, being decided by two scores or less.
Though, for all these reasons, 12 teams is the right amount, there are issues with the format as well. Let’s start with the byes. While Indiana was the outlier, the exception proves the rule. Last year, all four teams with a first round bye lost, and this year, three out of the four lost. Georgia, for example, went 25 days without a game after they beat Alabama in the SEC Championship. They then proceeded to put up zero points in the first quarter and lose to Ole Miss. Getting a bye has almost turned into a punishment, not an advantage, and the gap between games should be shortened, which there is definitely space to do.
Another complaint that I concede is that the actual championship game is too late. This year it was played on Jan. 19, and next year will be six days later than that. However, the issue is the overall CFB calendar, not the length of the playoffs. If the season simply started a week early, this wouldn’t be a problem.
The overall mission that the NCAA was on when they expanded the playoffs was to give more teams a shot and lower the controversy after the Alabama/FSU fiasco in 2023, where Florida State went undefeated and still missed the playoffs, while a one-loss Alabama made it in. While they seem to have done the first to perfection, the second is impossible. There are always going to be teams that think they were snubbed. It’s like increasing the lanes on a road to decrease the traffic – it’s never going to work. Why muddy the waters and increase the amount of teams when the controversy won’t end, it will just shift further back in the rankings? The NCAA needs to avoid changing the amount of teams in the CFP at all costs.
