College Football
24 Teams? College Football Is Trying to Turn the Playoff Into a Participation Trophy
College football apparently looked at its 12-team playoff and decided, “You know what this needs? Twelve more teams that have absolutely no chance of winning the national championship.” No, they have not officially voted to expand the College Football Playoff to 24 teams yet, and no final decision has been made. But when the people running the sport are already seriously discussing a 24-team format and looking at the television and media deals that would come with it, let’s not pretend this is just some harmless hypothetical conversation. They may not have bought the house yet, but they’ve already picked out the drapes, chosen the carpeting and started arguing about where the television is going.
Here is the biggest problem with the entire idea: THERE ARE NOT 24 TEAMS IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL CAPABLE OF WINNING THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP. There usually aren’t 12. That doesn’t mean the No. 12 team can’t upset the No. 5 team on a Saturday afternoon, because college football is full of upsets. But there is an enormous difference between pulling one upset and beating three, four or five elite programs in consecutive weeks to win a national championship. Cinderella might occasionally get invited to the dance, but asking her to beat Ohio State, Georgia, Alabama and another top-five team on four straight weekends is probably going to turn that glass slipper into dust.
Yes, NIL and the transfer portal are making college football more competitive, and that is one of the best things happening in the sport. Elite players are spreading out more than they used to, quarterbacks can transform programs overnight, and schools that once had very little chance of competing with the traditional powers can now build quality rosters much faster. That is real progress toward parity, but we are nowhere near the point where there are 24 legitimate national championship contenders. Maybe we get there someday, but expanding to 24 teams right now would be like building a six-car garage because you might own six cars 20 years from now.
The current 12-team playoff is already stretching the definition of “national championship contender.” Once you start reaching teams ranked around 10th, 11th and 12th, the conversation often changes from “This team can win the national championship” to “This team deserves a chance.” Those are two completely different things. Now imagine going all the way down to No. 24. At that point the selection committee might as well say, “Congratulations. You went 8-4, finished fifth in your conference, lost three games by double digits, but you beat somebody decent in September, so welcome to the national championship tournament.”
College football already has something for teams that had good seasons but were not national championship caliber. They are called bowl games, and apparently everyone forgot they exist. The playoff is supposed to identify the best team in the country, not become a postseason participation trophy for every program that managed to win more games than it lost. If a team plays an entire regular season and finishes as the 24th-best team in America, why exactly should that team suddenly receive four or five additional opportunities to prove that it is actually No. 1?
The damage to the regular season could be even worse. College football has traditionally possessed something unique in American sports: almost every game matters. Lose the wrong game in September and it can haunt you in December. Lose a rivalry game in November and your championship hopes might disappear. That pressure is part of what makes college football special. Keep expanding the playoff and eventually losing barely matters. One loss? You’re fine. Two losses? Still fine. Three losses? Probably still discussing seeding. Four losses? Well, let’s check the strength of schedule and see whether ESPN has an open television window.
At some point we should probably stop pretending that this is entirely about giving more teams “access” and “opportunity.” This is about money, and everybody knows it. More playoff teams mean more playoff games, which means more television inventory, more advertisements, more sponsorships and more money flowing through the system. There is nothing wrong with college football making money, but there is something ridiculous about pretending that adding another dozen teams somehow makes the championship more legitimate. It doesn’t. It simply creates another dozen games before the handful of teams that actually have a realistic chance of winning the title eventually play one another.
And where exactly does this logic stop? If No. 24 deserves a chance, why doesn’t No. 25? What if No. 26 lost to No. 24 by three points? Better make it 32 teams just to be safe. Then somebody will complain that No. 33 got screwed by the committee, so maybe we should jump to 64 and turn December into March Madness with shoulder pads. We can have bubble teams, bracketology shows and coaches sitting in conference rooms waiting nervously to find out whether their 7-5 football team has earned the right to compete for the national championship.
Maybe someday NIL and the transfer portal will create enough parity that a 20th-ranked team legitimately looks capable of running through the best teams in the country and winning it all. If that day comes, revisit the conversation. Right now, though, 12 teams are more than enough, and in some seasons even 12 will include teams that everybody watching knows have virtually no chance of surviving the entire bracket. Expanding because the sport might someday become competitive enough to justify it is backwards thinking.
College football does not need to fix something that is not broken simply because somebody discovered there might be another billion dollars sitting underneath it. The sport already spent decades watering down bowl games, rearranging conferences for television money and turning century-old rivalries into collateral damage. Now it appears ready to take one of the most meaningful regular seasons in sports and gradually make it less meaningful too. Twenty-four teams would not improve the College Football Playoff. It would turn it into the College Football Participation Trophy, and if the people running the sport are already shopping for the drapes and carpeting, somebody needs to take away their credit card before they buy the whole damn house.
