Better late than never. More than a year after we first began hearing rumors of an expanded, 12-team College Football Playoff, it appears to be a reality. The CFP's board of managers unanimously approved the measure on Friday; it will begin in 2026 at the latest but could start as early as 2024. (The way these things tend to work, that means it will likely start in 2024.)
In a nutshell, this is enormous, a much bigger change than the creation of the CFP in the first place. While there are always unintended consequences -- and while those consequences usually favor the sport's most powerful programs and conferences -- this is, in a vacuum, the biggest lurch toward inclusion ever seen in the top subdivision of college football. It increases incentives for both players and coaches, it potentially creates a needed layer of stability across FBS, it adds value to a ton of late-season conference games, and while it will result in certain games losing a bit of present-tense meaning, it will add meaning to countless other games. Here are seven takeaways, including an early shot at what a 12-team playoff might look like in 2024:
Four teams was an extra game; 12 is a genuine tournament
That was my biggest takeaway from this piece, my look at how a 12-team CFP would have taken shape over the past eight seasons. Based on existing CFP rankings, 41 different programs would have reached the playoff at least once in that span, and all but one conference (Conference USA) would have represented at least once.
Obviously the SEC and Big Ten, the two most powerful conferences in the sport (and conferences that are poised to grow in power moving forward), would have enjoyed ample representation in the field, averaging 5.6 bids per season (6.6 if you add in future members). But that's only about half the field. This is the most inclusive step the sport has ever taken, but even beyond that, giving everyone an extra round of games -- even the top four teams -- means inserting an extra layer of potential randomness into the proceedings.
More often than not, we're going to end up with Big Brand vs. Big Brand in the finals, as we have for most of the CFP's history (and that of the BCS before that). But occasionally we will see a mammoth upset and the chaos that unfolds because of it. This won't be the NCAA basketball tournament, with the 43rd-best team in the country making a run to the finals or anything, but it absolutely takes us a couple of steps away from "the single best team of the season wins the national title" (not that that happened every year or anything) and toward the tournament randomness that dictates the title for nearly every other college and professional sport this country produces. I don't say that as a 100% good thing -- there's certainly value in the best team and the champion being the same thing -- but it's most certainly not 100% negative either.
People will still care about the Iron Bowl
For those who pushed back on the thought of a four-team playoff and most certainly pushed back on something bigger, one of the go-to talking points has been the regular season won't matter anymore, people won't care about Rivalry Game A or Conference Game B because you might still get to play for the national title if you lose it, and one of the biggest draws of the sport -- that the regular season truly matters in a way it doesn't in other sports -- is dead.
Poppycock.
To be sure, there has always been more value in a single college football game than in other sports, simply because of the sample sizes involved. You're only guaranteed 12 games to make an impression, and to win the national title you have to either go unbeaten or hope you lose only once and get a mulligan.
Plenty of teams went unbeaten in the pre-playoff days and didn't get a title shot, however. Did their games matter? And to get one of those occasional mulligans, you had to play in a certain conference. You probably had to start pretty high in the preseason polls, too. And FBS teams from a number of conferences began a given season knowing that none of their games mattered in the title hunt.
A 12-team playoff with six autobids will mean every single team in FBS knows that, if it fields an awesome team and wins its conference -- and, in the case of Group of Five teams, probably finishes unbeaten or goes 12-1 and gets a little lucky -- it will get a shot at the championship. Many teams in the field of 12 will have little chance of actually winning the title, but they'll get a shot. That's all you can ask for.
Many people have hopped into my Twitter mentions and gone so far as to declare that late-season rivalry games like the Iron Bowl, for instance, will now be diminished because Alabama will sit players for more important games later on, or because, again, both teams could still get into the CFP no matter who won.
For one thing, this ignores that Alabama got into the four-team CFP in 2017 despite a loss to Auburn. For another thing, it insults college football. If you think handing out a few more playoff mulligans per season will make Auburn-Alabama, or Ohio State-Michigan, or USC-UCLA, or Texas-Texas A&M, or Florida-Florida State, or any of the sport's celebrated late-season rivalries -- or, for that matter, any of the other defining games we have seen played for decades and decades -- lose meaning, you do not have nearly enough faith in the sport itself. (Besides, only a few rivalries actually carry title stakes. NC State-North Carolina rarely has playoff implications, but it absolutely rules. And hello? Army-Navy?)
To be sure, a few extra games per season will have fewer repercussions to the loser. But even if certain games lose meaning, think of all the extra games that matter in the CFP race now.
Here are the championship week games that had at least slight CFP implications last season: No. 1 Georgia vs. No. 3 Alabama (SEC championship), No. 2 Michigan vs. No. 13 Iowa (Big Ten championship), No. 4 Cincinnati vs. No. 21 Houston (AAC championship). If Cincinnati, Michigan or Alabama would have lost, then the Big 12 championship (No. 5 Oklahoma State vs. No. 9 Baylor) would have mattered, too.
With a 12-team playoff, all those games would have mattered, as would the Pac-12 championship (No. 10 Oregon vs. No. 17 Utah) and ACC championship (No. 15 Pitt vs. No. 16 Wake Forest). And if Houston would have beaten Cincinnati, that could have brought CFP implications to the Mountain West championship (No. 19 SDSU vs. Utah State) as well.
This says nothing of the rivalry week games that would have featured extra implications as well -- No. 9 Ole Miss vs. Mississippi State, No. 6 Notre Dame vs. Stanford, No. 12 Michigan State vs. Penn State, No. 13 BYU vs. USC, No. 14 Wisconsin vs. Minnesota, et cetera.
A few games lose meaning, and a bunch more add meaning. That's profit right there.
Autobids: key to stability
David Pollack and Desmond Howard react to the College Football Playoff expanding to 12 teams.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey began dropping warnings this summer. He was part of the original committee that crafted the 12-team proposal last summer, but after the original negotiation went off the rails over the course of 2021-22, taken down by distrust in the aftermath of the SEC's addition of Oklahoma and Texas, he removed his inner filter. Would the SEC perhaps just set up its own playoff? Would he push for the removal of automatic bids from the proposal and let lesser conferences fight for fewer spots in an expanded playoff in the future?
It had an, "If you're going to treat me like the villain, I'm going to act like the villain" vibe to it, and in the short-term, at least, it was all talk. Sankey appears to have agreed to the old proposal.
If you want to envision a very different college football future, one in which the Big Ten and SEC have each expanded to 24 or 32 teams each, forming a de facto super-league atop the sport and relegating everyone else from the competition, it starts with ditching autobids. That the proposed 12-team playoff continues to reserve six spots (and the top four seeds) for conference champions is a very good thing for the stability of the sport. Even if the top two conferences continue to grow in power, there's still value in becoming the Big 12 or Pac-12 or ACC champion. There's still a path to inclusion for at least one more conference champion, too. That probably won't stop anyone from jumping at the chance to join one of the two heavyweight conferences if invited, but it ensures a bit more structure in the sport as a whole. At least, it does for a while longer.
The first round is going to be spectacular
For those of us who were giddy at the thought of huge mid-December home games in Tuscaloosa or Columbus or Los Angeles, we didn't get all of what we wanted. It appears bowls are likely to host quarterfinal and semifinal games, meaning the top four seeds won't get an extra home game in a given year -- only those seeded fifth through eighth.
We're still going to get four extra games per year that are (a) intense and ridiculously exciting and (b) on a team's home field. In recent years, that would have included games like Oklahoma State at Ole Miss or Utah at Notre Dame in 2021, Georgia at Cincinnati, Coastal Carolina at Notre Dame and Indiana at Texas A&M in 2020, and Florida at Wisconsin and Penn State at Baylor in 2019. There are plenty of college football fans who reminisce about a past in which big bowl games mattered and few key players were opting out. It's like an extra batch of heavy-duty (and often very unique) nonconference matchups, only in packed stadiums and with massive stakes. It's going to be so much fun.
A 2024 CFP simulation
At the very least, we still have to wait two more years for this to get started, and if college football has taught us anything, it's that -- Nick Saban's Alabama aside -- a lot about this sport's balance of power can change in two years. Predicting who will be in the first 12-team playoff is a true fool's errand ... but I've never said I'm not a fool.
Using Adam Rittenberg's Future Power Rankings as a guide, and adding my own editorial twist, allow me to become the first person on the planet to project the 2024 CFP:
First Round
No. 9 Texas A&M at No. 8 Oregon (Pac-12 champion)
No. 10 Miami at No. 7 Georgia
No. 11 Oklahoma at No. 6 Michigan
No. 12 SMU (AAC champion) at No. 5 Notre Dame
Quarterfinals
Cotton Bowl: No. 2 Ohio State (Big Ten champion) vs. Georgia-Miami winner
Orange Bowl: No. 3 Clemson (ACC champion) vs. Michigan-Oklahoma winner
Fiesta Bowl: No. 4 Cincinnati (Big 12 champion) vs. Notre Dame-SMU winner
Peach Bowl: No. 1 Alabama (SEC champion) vs. Oregon-A&M winner
Semifinals
Rose Bowl: Cotton Bowl winner vs. Orange Bowl winner
Sugar Bowl: Peach Bowl winner vs. Fiesta Bowl winner
Finals
In Atlanta, as previously scheduled. Will it be Alabama vs. Ohio State? Possibly. I choose to live in a world where SMU vs. Miami is a distinct possibility.
Game moving from coaches to players
College football is in a strange place at the moment. On one hand, its relationship with fans has rarely been in more flux. When Oklahoma and Texas leave for the SEC, it will ding the earning potential of plenty of well-run football programs in the Big 12, and it will end seven conference series that have taken place at least 70 times -- including Bedlam, which has been played 116 times.
Granted, it will re-introduce three such series as well (Texas-Texas A&M, Oklahoma-Missouri, Texas-Arkansas), but USC and UCLA moving to the Big Ten will take away nine such series and add none.
If your team is awesome, you will still show up to the stadium and get excited. Big games are big no matter the opponent. (That said, the thought of fans having to attend three neutral-site games in short succession to watch their team during a playoff run in the future is certainly suboptimal from a cost perspective.)
But when your team is mediocre or worse, you have old, weathered spite to bring you to the stadium -- the kind we saw on Thursday night in the Pitt-WVU Backyard Brawl, a rivalry that should have never taken an 11-year pause in the first place. There is less of that than ever in college football, and we're about to lose even more. And even if you're staying home to watch your team's games on TV, the number of streaming services you have to subscribe to seemingly increases by the day!
On the other hand, this is more player-friendly than it has ever been, and it's getting friendlier. Players can actually profit off of their contributions to the sport.
If a player chooses the wrong college out of high school, he can move on without having to sit on the sidelines for a year or have his former coach block his transfer to specific schools. A Jahmyr Gibbs can sign on to a rebuilding project at Georgia Tech and, when he turns out to be too good for what turns out to be a stalled rebuild, he can go and play for Alabama instead. He can also -- finally -- actually profit off of his contributions to the sport. This could become even more the case with an expanded playoff. It offers more players opportunities to play in bigger games, and while they would be taking on extra risk with more games, they could profit from those games, too. As ESPN's Dan Murphy has noted, even if we don't yet see a strict pay-for-play arrangement anytime soon, we could see an interpretation of NIL includes revenue-sharing arrangements between conferences and their players.
This player-friendly trend has done nothing to hurt the college football viewing experience in recent years. Bryce Young was an absolute treat to watch last year even while he was making money in the seven digits. Put the game in the players' hands, and they usually reward you for it.
Everything is 'bad for college football'
On average, 24,000 people are in Missoula to attend Montana home games every other weekend or so. Seventeen thousand are in Jacksonville -- not that one, the other one in Alabama -- for Jacksonville State. Eleven thousand are in Allendale, Michigan, for Grand Valley State. Seven thousand are in Hampden Sydney, Virginia (not hyphenated), for the Hampden-Sydney Tigers (hyphenated). Nearly 2,500 are in eastern Sioux City, Iowa, for NAIA's Morningside. Stadiums are full and loud throughout the HBCU universe, from Jackson State (30K+) to Southern (17K) to Morehouse (10K). Around 15,000 loyalists still show up at New Mexico State games in Las Cruces, 20,000 for rivalry games.
Add it all up, and you're approaching a million fans per week showing up for college football games every weekend at the FCS, D2, D3 and NAIA levels alone. (All of those levels have large playoffs, too, by the way.) Throw in the Group of Five, and it soars past a million.
In each of these places, and hundreds more around the country, it takes hundreds of people to put on these games -- players and coaches and bus drivers and referees and trainers and press box operators and grounds crew. And then there are the fans and parents, the hotels and the college-town pizza places that make a good percentage of their annual income from home-game Saturdays.
College football is enormous. It's bigger than all of us. It is a living, breathing ecosystem to itself, the ultimate long-tail experience. It is a limitless rabbit hole; the more you dig, the more things you find that someone loves and cares about (and the more you start to love and care about them too). Television ratings go up and down based on the precise combination of big and well-timed matchups. Attendance at the FBS level has inched down a bit in the 2000s but is still cumulatively enormous. The sport remains beloved and constantly obsessed about and doted on by those who love it most.
And since virtually the day it first became relevant, those who love it most have also attempted to predict its demise.
Every rule change, from the legalization of the forward pass to the targeting rule, has been decried as a mockery of Walter Camp's vision, a confirmation that kids these days aren't as tough as they used to be, and a sign that the sport is embarking on its own downfall. Every new interpretation of the rules -- especially those involving tempo -- kicks up a wave of existential hand-wringing from coaches (remember "Is this what we want football to be?") and the commentators most closely tied to those coaches.
Every concession the sport makes to television has been seen as a betrayal of all morals and values and a clear signal of impending doom, even if every major team sport has made similar concessions. (Beloved baseball writer Roger Angell, not a natural-born harrumpher, was harrumphing about television's increasing influence 55 years ago. The topic has existed for quite a while.)
Every shift the sport makes toward increasing player rights, from freer transfer rules to the possibility of actually paying them for their contributions to the sport, has been met with not only grumbles but outright derision. Nothing will kill the sport faster than players having actual agency (even though people said the exact same thing about baseball free agency and every major player-friendly development at the professional level, and there was no decrease in popularity to be found in the following years)!
From NIL to the transfer portal, from the SEC's dominance to ESPN's, from superconferences to the current CFP, there's been plenty for traditionalists to worry about of late. But the game charges on. I have followed college football since I was in elementary school -- I still retain a decent amount of encyclopedic knowledge about the 1985 Oklahoma Sooners -- and I have based a good portion of my livelihood on writing about it. I am as concerned for its future as anyone. But of all the pressing issues it faces at the moment, I cannot even pretend to worry about an expanded playoff. It will change the game in many different ways, we will find we like some of the effects and dislike others, and this indomitable sport will continue to inch on down the road regardless.