The travesty of the 12-team college football playoff

The college football playoffs will look very different next season. It will have 12 teams contending for the national championship, spanning late December and well into January. The teams will comprise the six highest-ranked conference champions and six at-large bids. The four highest-ranked conference champions will be given a bye in the first round. Seeds 5–12 will play at the higher seed’s home field. After the first round of games, all future games will be played on a neutral site field with them at one of the new year’s six bowl games. They are concluding with the crowning of the national champion.

The automatic bids for the six highest-ranked champions are a terrible idea. With the Pac-12 conference ending, the power four conferences will each have a team, and then two groups of five will enter. We have seen before when a group of five teams gets into a playoff with Cincinnati, and Alabama destroyed them. There have been times when a 7-5 or an 8-4 team makes the conference championship, and if they win, they get an automatic bid to the playoffs. Two teams could play each other three times in one season, which gets boring to watch.

There would be a lot of rematches of regular season matchups and postseason games year after year. Using the most recent college football playoff rankings, half of the opening-round games would be rematches from the regular season. Later on, there would probably be more rematches of games as well. This will ultimately lead to what has happened previously, where Alabama played Clemson in the national title game three times in a four-year span. Even though it gives more teams a chance at winning, rematches will headline it. After that, people wanted expansion because they were tired of seeing those teams play.

The playoff is being expanded to 12 teams from the previous four teams. Just like after it was expanded to four teams in a few years, there will be people who want to expand it more. It went from 2 teams to 4 to 12 and will be expanded more. It will be a never-ending expansion, which makes regular-season games meaningless. When it was expanded to 4 teams, there was still the sense that you had to win every game you played; now, you can have a few losses. It is becoming apparent that you have to be above average and not one of the best.

Ultimately, 12 teams is way too many to allow into the playoffs. With conference realignment, it has become the survival of the fittest. Only the best teams will survive, and it should be like that. It rewards mediocrity and gives teams the headline that they made the playoffs. It turns into a participation trophy and not the best of the best.