What’s Wrong With the College Football Playoff?
The 2025 NCAA national championship celebration. Photo courtesy.
Two years ago college football was turned on its head when the NCAA introduced the new 12-Team College Football Playoff. It immediately caught the attention of every football fan as an exciting and new development in the game they love, but it’s safe to say that there’s been some bumps in the road.
I think an expanded playoff is a great idea. It’s a little more forgiving; it lets a team drop a game or two while still having chances to prove themselves later in the year.
The problem came when the 2024/25 playoff actually started. The first round was great. It had some good competitive games but there were also worse teams getting blown out, which was expected and not the problem, the problem came a week later in the second round when every single team with a first-round bye lost their game. Getting a bye was supposed to be a reward for having a good regular season but this felt more like a punishment than a reward.
Fast forward a year to the second-ever 12-team playoff and this year teams with a bye went 1-3 with Indiana being the only team winning. Which in my opinion has more to do with their opponent, Alabama, not being quite on par with the other teams in that stage of the playoffs. Now that means in two years teams that got the “reward” of a first-round bye had gone 1-8 in their second-round games which brings up an obvious question: how do you fix the first-round bye issue?
Currently the Big Ten and SEC are discussing whether they should switch to a 16 or even 24 team playoff. My preference is 16 teams because if you weren’t a top 15 or 16 team in the country you probably aren’t a real title contender and teams that have a chance to make a run will get tired or possibly have injuries playing games that frankly don’t matter to them.
There’s also the issue of time, they only have until Friday, January 23 to make the decision before we get stuck with another year of the 12-team playoff. I would rather see either of those options than another year with 12 teams watching the top teams essentially getting punished for winning games and not playing a real game of football for almost a month after the regular season, so whatever they choose it needs to happen fast.
