Recently, an internal Big Ten document showed what a 24-team College Football Playoff would have looked like using rankings for the 2025 season.
It’s no surprise that the monsters in charge of college athletics would consider something as heinous as the expansion of the College Football Playoff. There is no reason for the playoffs to expand to 16 or even 24 teams.
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If anything, the playoffs would go perfectly well with just eight teams, but at this point the genie isn’t going back in the bottle.
Look at the first two years of the 12-team College Football Playoff. How many memorable first round matches have there been? The one thing that stands out from the eight playoff games played on campus over the past two years is that the Buckeyes took a 21-0 first-quarter lead against Tennessee and cracked Nico Iamaleava’s helmet so hard that he ended up at UCLA before the start of the 2025 season.
It felt like this year’s first round games were even harder to watch. Miami and Texas A&M battled to see who could miss the most field goals in Saturday’s opener, while Ole Miss and Oregon received glorified byes.
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We’ve already seen the Rebels beat Tulane once during the regular season, I don’t know why we needed to see a sequel. If Oregon hadn’t pulled its starters with the game well in hand, the final score against James Madison wouldn’t have looked as respectable as it did.
Under the Big Ten’s proposed plan, the top eight ranked teams would receive a bye into the second round of the playoffs. For example, Ohio State would face the winner of Utah and Michigan, ranked 15th and 18th, respectively.
Anyone who watched The Game in late November knows that the Wolverines were not a playoff team. Not that I’m against seeing two editions of the rivalry in one month, but I just don’t think the result would have been much different in the second meeting.
Nothing against Utah, but I find it hard to believe they would have made it past the second round if there had been a 24-team playoff in 2025. The Utes were 11-2 on the season, with their losses to Texas Tech and BYU.
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Do you remember anything about Utah football in 2025 other than Kyle Whittingham is now Michigan’s head coach? There has to be a break at some point.
Make no mistake, there are some interesting first round games when it comes to TV content and gambling. Miami/Iowa would have been an interesting culture shock. USC/Arizona would have been a throwback to the Pac-12 days.
Imagine telling someone 10 years ago that in the future Vanderbilt/Virginia would be a college football playoff game. They would have equipped you with a straitjacket and a padded room.
Of course, an empty suit like athletic director Ross Bjork would love the idea of a 24-team College Football Playoff. I’m sure he’s already planning watch parties at the 1922 Club for mega donors, where it will cost at least $1,000 to get into the festivities.
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I’m sure I’m being harsh when it comes to Bjork, I just feel like he’s programmed like The Terminator in a way, except his internal computer deciphers how much money he can extract from people.
If the College Football Playoff is to double in size, when will the season start? Will there still be conference championship games? You just know that conferences won’t want to give up their winning money in conference title games.
Before you know it, college football teams are playing as many games as NFL teams. At least now college football players are at least getting paid to put their bodies on the line on the field, so expansion doesn’t seem as dirty as it would have 10 to 15 years ago.
It’s the same argument as the one about expanding the NCAA tournament into college basketball. Once the brackets are revealed, no one says, “I thought I had a real chance of winning it all this year!” »
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I know the transfer portal and NIL have introduced some parity to college athletics, but it’s not like we’re going to have a Cinderella story like Leicester City rising up to win it all.
Bigger isn’t always better. In a way, I wish we were back in the BCS days, because at least then we only had to rely on computers and not a committee. At least it seemed like the computers were doing things correctly more often than not.
Today, college football and college basketball officials are too concerned with money and keeping their television partners happy.
Whatever happens, at least I understand that when it comes to the expansion of the College Football Playoff and the NCAA Tournament, it’s all downhill from here on out.
