February 1, 2025
The 12-Team College Football Playoff Is Absurd
By Twilight Patriot
In the flurry of news items coming out of the presidential inauguration, one of them stands out for its uniqueness: J.D. Vance’s complaint, a few days before being sworn in as vice president, that he would prefer to have spent the evening of January 20 at the Ohio States vs. Notre Dame title game.
Fortunately for Vance, a proud Buckeye alum, Ohio State won. (Unfortunately for my own Indiana family, Notre Dame lost.)
Television executives were disappointed. The game had the third fewest viewers out of the last eleven college championships. This is unsurprising when the 12-team playoff format — a massive expansion over the 4-team system that existed until last year — has pushed the title game so late into January that not only did it conflict with the inauguration, but the NFL playoffs (which in the past have always started after the college champion is decided) were mostly over by then as well. In short, it’s possible for people to get tired of watching football, and this year, most of us did.
The season finale wasn’t the only part of college football that suffered. The conference championships, played in the first week of December, are practically a non-event under the new rules. I remember last year how excited most fans were about those games, since back then they were make-or-break events — winning its conference didn’t guarantee that a team would advance, but teams who didn’t win weren’t going anywhere.
But this time, three out of four Power-4 championships sent both the winner and the loser to the playoffs. Even more bizarrely, the eventual national champion, the Ohio Buckeyes, made the playoffs without even playing in the Big Ten championship. To add to the commotion, the one team that began the playoffs undefeated — the Oregon Ducks — was eliminated after a second-round loss to the Buckeyes, who had already lost a game to Oregon in Week 7, before losing again to Michigan in Week 14.
In short, college football used to be a sport where every game mattered, and playing for a national title was the reward that a team earned by playing very, very well all season long. (Out of the ten champions between 2014 and 2023, five had perfect seasons, and the other five had only one loss each.) Now there are hardly any make-or-break moments until the playoffs themselves, when a lucky four weeks just might outweigh a lacklustre season up to that point.
The question of how we came to this point has both a simple answer and a complicated one.
The simple answer is that expanding the playoff to twelve teams was a gross overcorrection to a genuine problem: under the old rules, a team might go undefeated in a good conference (as the Florida State Seminoles did in the SEC in 2023) only to get passed over by the ranking committee in favor of one-loss teams with slightly stronger schedules (the Texas Longhorns and Alabama Crimson Tide). Letting the Seminoles get left out like this was indeed an embarrassment for college football. Even so, there were plenty of less radical ways to fix the problem — the ranking system could have been rebalanced to give more weight to perfect seasons, or the playoffs could have been expanded to six teams rather than twelve.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/the_12_team_college_football_playoff_is_absurd.html
