A 12-team College Football Playoff is gaining momentum … here’s the smartest way to do it

The Jan. 1, 2018 Peach Bowl could have been a great playoff game.

We’ve gone through seven years of the four-team College Football Playoff, and many people feel it just isn’t working. Interest in the sport is waning outside of the few pockets of the country that always have a team in the mix.

College football’s leaders put out a statement last week saying they’ve reviewed 63 different possibilities for a future playoff format. And The Athletic reported earlier this week that a 12-team playoff is gaining momentum.

A month or so before I started this newsletter, I wrote a post advocating for a 12-team playoff as the best option going forward. I laid out the exact parameters of how I would run a 12-team playoff and exactly what it would have looked like each year since the CFP started in 2014.

You can click on the link in the last paragraph to read the whole post, but I’ll dive into some of key components here. I still believe a 12-team playoff — if done correctly — is the best way to run an expanded postseason tournament without ruining the excitement of the college football regular season.

Automatic bids for the top eight conference champions, byes for the top four

In a 12-team playoff, a bye and more would be on the line in the SEC Championship Game each year.

One of the biggest problems with the current format is that it’s too subjective. It often feels more like an invitational than a real playoff. An expanded playoff needs to include automatic bids for some teams.

I landed on automatic bids for the top eight conference champions for a few reasons:

One, I don’t think it makes any sense to distinguish between Power 5 and Group of 5 leagues when giving automatic bids. They’re all Division I conferences, so just give automatic bids to the top eight champs. That pretty much assures that any conference champ with a halfway legitimate claim to play for a national title gets a shot to do so.

You could drop that number to seven or even six, but the key here is limiting the number of at-large bids so as to not dilute the meaningfulness of regular season games. With only four at-large bids, teams like 2019 Penn State, 2020 Iowa State and 2020 Indiana that had good-not-great seasons still would have missed the playoff. If you expand the number of at-large bids, more of those fringe teams get in and the regular season takes a hit.

And finally, giving automatic bids to conference champions — and stipulating that only conference champions can receive first-round byes — adds a great deal of importance to conference championship games. While the SEC or Big Ten title game losers may still make the playoff, the outcome of that game could be the difference between getting a first-round bye and hosting a second-round game vs. playing a first-round game on the road.

This would also keep teams like 2016 Ohio State, 2017 Alabama and 2020 Notre Dame, which did not win their conferences, from receiving the privilege of a first-round bye.

Play the first two rounds on campus

Imagine a Penn State white-out game in the postseason.

There aren’t any better atmospheres in American sports than those of football Saturdays in college towns. We should be playing as many postseason games as possible on campus.

It’s probably likely that the national semifinals still have to be played within the New Year’s bowl system, so that means playing the first two rounds of a 12-team playoff on campus in December.

That sets up a situation in which the top eight teams all get to host one playoff game. Teams seeded 5–8 host in the first round and teams 1–4 host in the second round. No team gets to host a second playoff game.

This again keeps the importance on the regular season. While 12 teams get in, there’s a big difference between being seeded 1–4 (bye+home game) vs. being seeded 5–8 (first-round home game) vs. being seeded 9–12 (no home game).

This will keep a far greater number of fan bases engaged during the regular season than the current model, in which huge swaths of the country know they won’t be part of the playoff by late October.

Hmm, those first-round match-ups don’t look great

There could be some first-round blowouts. But you just never know.

OK, so what are the potential problems with this plan?

One I could see is that the first-round match-ups often don’t seem all that appetizing. Most years, you’ll get an 8 vs. 9 game between two second-tier P5 teams, with the other three games pitting a good P5 team against a G5 champion.

But here’s the value: You get better quarterfinal games this way than you would with an eight-team playoff.

In an eight-team playoff, you’d likely end up with a G5 team as the № 8 seed against the № 1 team in the county. It’s probably going to be a blowout.

With the 12-team playoff, the first round provides a March Madness feel with G5 champs going up against the second- or third- best teams from a P5 conference. The G5 teams get their shot, but they will typically lose, and you get to weed them out in favor of better quarterfinal opponents for the top four teams.

Plus, how much better would it really be to watch 10–3 Colorado or 9–3 Indiana as one of the road teams in the first round? I’d rather keep the at-large bids to a minimum to avoid diluting the importance of regular season games, and give access to more G5 schools to limit controversy.

What about rematches? And the amount of games teams will be playing?

Clemson and Notre Dame played twice last season.

Another potential pitfall of this plan could be that we‘d see rematches in the playoffs. But there’s an easy way to fix that.

Rather than seeding teams 1 through 12 like I did, the seeding could work more like college basketball with two sets of teams seeded 1 through 6 or four sets of teams seeded 1 through 3.

By seeding them that way, the selection committee could keep teams that faced during the regular season away from each other in the bracket.

There may still be the occasional rematch, but that’s not such a bad thing, especially if the first meeting earlier in the season was a great game.

As for the number of games, a 12-team playoff would likely only add one game to each team’s schedule. The only way it would add two games would be if a team seeded 5–12 made the championship game, which likely wouldn’t happen often.

That being said, I wouldn’t mind seeing a non-conference game trimmed off the regular season. Let’s get rid of those “buy games” in which Ohio State pays UTEP a million bucks to come to Columbus and get decked.

Let’s drop one or two of those games and adopt the Big Ten’s “Champions Week” model in every conference. This way, teams like the aforementioned 2016 Ohio State and 2017 Alabama can’t just sit at home in early December while another team in the conference loses in the conference championship game.

I liked this concept four months ago and I still like it now. What do you think?

Thanks so much for reading! Hope you enjoyed this newsletter. If you have thoughts and feedback, I’d love to hear from you. Every newsletter will be posted to this website, so you can comment there. You can also email me directly at this address.

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