ESPN: College football will begin an expanded playoff of 24 teams starting in 2027, eliminating conference championships
At first blush, upon hearing about the news that the college football playoffs were expanding to 24 teams, up from the 12 team current format, my knee-jerk reaction was (unsurprisingly) whyyyyy?
The main issue I felt like was going to happen was just an extension of what we the fans have witnessed the last two years of the updated CFB 12-team playoff – there just aren’t really any credible contenders past maybe the top six, which are usually the same schools every year – 1-3 SEC schools, Ohio State, Oregon, Notre Dame, and maybe a school or two having a really good year on account of a perfect storm of beast upperclassmen with some hotshot true freshman QB.
But the teams typically ranked 7-12, the Arizona States, Tulanes, JMUs and SMUs, everyone and their mothers know that they’re just going to get rolled by the schools who maybe had two-losses and couldn’t outright win their conferences, like the Texases, Ole Misses, Penn States and whoever lost the SEC championship.
Adding twelve more teams to the mix meant we’re going to see a whole bunch of potential scrubs and/or 3+ loss teams squeak into the playoffs, and could be more of the same, where they get absolutely mauled by a power-4 school who has finally begun to gel and are figuring things out at the right moment.
Obviously, when the day is over, money is what is driving this whole thing to fruition, and win or lose, I’m going to assume that any and all participants in future 24-team playoff tournaments, will probably benefit greatly financially, be it directly from CFB, NCAA, BCS or whatever overarching organization is really in charge of college football these days.
However, I have to imagine that in the process of coming to this outcome of where 24-teams is going to happen, while conference championships are no longer going to be a thing, there are probably a lot of really upset cities, mainly the host cities for the power-4, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Charlotte and DFW. I can’t speak for any of the cities other than Atlanta, but the SEC championship is about as on-par with most major sporting events as far as economic impact for the city goes, and I’d imagine the other host cities probably feel some ways about suddenly being told that they won’t be having these critical games and the economic impact they bring anymore after this season.
$1.7B is a whole lot of cheese, and over five years, that’s roughly $300M per, and that gets divided amongst god knows how many parties, and somewhere along the line, those slices of pie probably have to be larger than what the host cities, as well as all participants and contributors of college football are owed, in order for this to have any shot of financial viability.
But a funny thing happened today while I was thinking about this topic throughout the day. Just based on the current AP rankings, if next year’s playoff format were to have started today, and if we were just hypothetically going the top-24 teams in the nation, there’s not nearly as many patsy schools in the lower half of the bracket that I imagined would be the case this time next season.
For example, currently between ranks 18-24 are schools like Oregon, Ole Miss, TOSU and LSU, among others, including South Carolina, who has been on a tear lately. The SEC has been a relative bloodbath all season, where it seems like every team has upset a higher rank at some point, gaining rank, before getting upended by another SEC school. These are all schools who would be capable of beating schools like Texas Tech, Wake Forest, Kentucky and Boise State.
It’s not the memories I’ve had of years past where the Top-25 was basically the top ten schools in the nation followed by whole bunch of 1-2 loss schools who really aren’t really a threat, to fill out the remaining 15 schools, and I feel like this season in particular was everything that the CFB committee has really been hoping the NIL era would do, where it’s begun to disperse talent more equitably across the landscape, and we’re climbing to a level or parity that hasn’t really been the case in a very, very long time.
Another thing I kind of like about the new format, is that with the dissolution of conference championship games, Notre Dame no longer has that advantage of not having to play a 13th game in the regular season, because frankly nobody is going to have to anymore.
So really, it’s too early to tell what’s going to happen next year; we may very well still have schools like Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State, Notre Dame and other notoriously reputable programs who win it all again, but the chase for the championship could very well to be entertaining and not as pointless as I initially thought.
Initially, I didn’t feel like this was a great idea at first blush, but thinking about it, like actually really thinking about it, perhaps it’s not going to be that bad. However, that being said, watch the 2027 revert back to a season where there are a bunch of 12-0 and 11-1 squads in the top-10, and the rest of the field is filled out by some Tulanes, JMUs, Arizona States and Oklahomas again, all prepared to get stomped by 30.