3 big College Football Playoff takeaways now that we have a bracket

The stage is set for the college football wars to come.

I’m not here to break down the College Football Playoff bracket. I’m two days late for that, and besides, it didn’t require that much breaking down. The only real decision that needed to be made was Alabama vs. SMU, and Alex Kirshner at Slate wrote about the short- and long-term necessity of why the committee needed to pick SMU.

I’m here because I’ve been writing about this 12-team playoff for years now—first post, June 2021—and now THERE’S A BRACKET TO LOOK AT! A real one with teams in it! It’s really here! And after taking some time to sit and cuddle with the newborn baby bracket, here’s how I’m feeling about the future of the format:

We’re being too nice to The Bowl People

The first round of the playoff is going to KICK ASS. It’s the first-ever playoff round with games played at home sites, and all four are incredible venues.

The highlight is Indiana-Notre Dame, at Notre Dame, a literal matchup of church and state. Indiana is playing their best season ever. Notre Dame is just a few hours away in the same state, but never schedules Indiana because they’re snooty and don’t consider the Hoosiers a rival¹. Now they’re forced into an in-state showdown in their gigantic sacred stadium. I am GEEKED.

We also have playoff games at Penn State, Texas, and Ohio State, all of which should be electric. Think about the iconic traditions that are now a part of the Playoff: Penn State’s white-out… Texas’ trash toss… Ohio State’s band spelling out Ryan Day’s home address on the field in big script letters so fans can send him pipe bombs… it’s going to be beautiful.

But after that, the next two rounds are played at neutral sites—specifically, the six bowl sites called the “New Year’s Six” during the four-team era². Needless to say, the atmosphere for an Oregon-Arizona State matchup in Atlanta will be less hyped than a Penn State home game in Happy Valley.

But it’s also bad from a competitive sense. The top four seeds get byes, but they don’t get the home-field advantage they earned over the course of the season. Oregon is the top seed and might have to play a de facto semifinal road game against 5-seeded Texas in Dallas. And awful for fans, who will have to travel to at least three neutral site games to see their team win a championship. It strips the sport of the regional flavor it was built on, replacing it with lifeless NFL environments³.

Why use this convoluted, inconvenient, and unenjoyable format? Blame The Bowl People. When college football began seeking legitimate championship formats, it threatened to displace bowl games, which used to be high-stakes post-season matchups between top opponents, but were now clearly second-class to actual playoff matchups. This could’ve been ruinous for the people who run those games, all of whom are great hangs in the country club dining room. So under every subsequent system the sport has invented, the bowls have been included, even if their presence didn’t really make sense⁴. After all, the outgoing executive director of the Playoff, Bill Hancock, was previously the executive director of the Bowl Championship Series, which was built around the bowls. These are his friends.

I enjoy bowl games! You can catch me watching the Hawai’i Bowl on Christmas Eve! But these games in these stadiums are not really even bowl games. They’re playoff games.

If college football wants to have a big boy championship, it needs to make big boy decisions. Cut off The Bowl People. I don’t care if they’re great guys who can light up the room at a catered luncheon. They don’t need to be stakeholders here, and yet the playoff inconveniences everybody to appease them. What will happen to The Bowl People if they’re not a part of the Playoff? Not our problem! Give us home games through the semis and play the national championship at the Rose Bowl every year. Easy call.

More teams means less anger

In 2023, the final year of the 4-team playoff, the selection committee made its most unconscionable decision to date: Leaving out 13-0 Florida State and including 12-1 Texas and Alabama. FSU had clearly earned the spot, but the committee left them out, essentially, on speculation: After an injury to quarterback Jordan Travis (and an injury to his backup), the committee assumed they would be worse going forward than Texas and Bama.

It’s hard to overstate the impact the decision had on FSU’s football program and overall psyche. They sent a C-team to their non-playoff bowl game game, lost by 60, and then followed that up with an impossibly bad season, going 2-10, the worst record in school history. They got robbed, missing out on a once-in-a-who-knows chance at national championship glory, and may never recover.

This year? It’s a lot harder for the first team out to feel slighted—even when that team is Alabama, a team with a famously irrational fanbase completely unused to rejection. They tried to fake it—a guy hopped on BlueSky to yell at me about how SMU was going to lose by 30, and their AD vented about how he’ll never schedule tough non-conference games again, which is funny, because he actually scheduled a bunch of very easy non-conference games this year—but it was weak stuff. Their anger peaked at a 4 and they’ll be down to a 2 by the end of the week.

You know why? They lost to Vanderbilt!⁵And they lost 24-3 to an Oklahoma team that finished 6-6⁶. You lose those games, you kinda understand that you don’t belong in the national championship picture⁷.

This is why bigger is better. The first team left out of the 68-team NCAA Tournament in basketball doesn’t storm the capitol. They get bummed for a bit and then they go play in the NIT. There’s less injustice in including a few potentially weak teams than excluding a potentially great one.

The stage is set for the wars to come.

The new playoff format goes to great lengths to elevate the champions of various leagues. It reserves the four first-round byes for the four highest-ranked winners of conference championship games, and gives an automatic bid to the fifth-highest winner. This year, the byes went to top-ranked Oregon, second-ranked Georgia, ninth-ranked Boise State, and 12th-ranked Arizona State, and the fifth automatic bid went to 16th-ranked Clemson.

The autobids and auto-byes are my favorite part of the format. Because conference champions were guaranteed spots, hundreds of games spanning almost every conference⁸ had real effects on the playoff field this season, making 2024 one of the most enjoyable years of college football I’ve ever watched. Because of those auto-byes, Arizona State’s Skattebo-powered win streak after a 5-2 start led them to the quarterfinals. Because conference championships matter, 9-3 Clemson drilled a walk-off 56-yard field goal that secured a playoff spot. Because of this format, Army and Colorado and UNLV played in games with playoff relevance this year. Variety is the spice of life, and with teams from all over the country legitimately in the race, this season had seasoning.

Of course, the SEC and Big Ten would like to change this. It’s too inclusive. And when they point at the rankings, they can say the format is objectively unfair to them. The top four should’ve been four teams from those conferences (Oregon and Georgia, then Texas and Penn State.) And 11th-ranked Alabama should be in the field over 16th-ranked ACC champion Clemson. Yes, the Big Ten and SEC already have seven of the 12 teams in the field, two of the four byes, and three of the four home games… but they’re always hungry. There were rumors earlier this year that they already want to reformat the playoff, and even a rankings-based process wouldn’t be enough: They want to secure multiple automatic bids for themselves and leave everybody else to fight for scraps.

This is the next war in the sport. These conferences have already taken so much from everybody else. They’ve taken the best teams from other conferences—you’ll notice former Pac-12 team Oregon and former Big 12 team Texas are now in the Big Ten and SEC—and hey’ve negotiated an uneven payout structure, where each Big Ten and SEC school makes about $8 million more annually from the Playoff’s TV revenue per year than Big 12 and ACC schools, no matter what. It’s not enough. It’s never enough.

It’s somewhat remarkable that in a sport with such uneven power dynamics, the littler leagues were able to secure this format. I hope they have enough bargaining power to keep it.

1. Notre Dame hasn’t played Indiana since 1991, but they have scheduled a home-and-home for 2030 and 2031.

2. Namely: The Cotton Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, the Peach Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Rose Bowl, and the Sugar Bowl.

3. Five of the six are now played NFL stadiums—including the Cotton Bowl and the Orange Bowl, both of which used to play in stadiums called the Cotton Bowl and the Orange Bowl but are now played at the Cowboys’ and Dolphins’ stadiums.. The Rose Bowl is still played in the Rose Bowl.

4. This article explains how the Rose Bowl nearly held up the expansion to the 12 team playoff format—a move which would have thrown $450 million in TV contracts into the trash—then goes on to state “it was not clear what leverage the Rose Bowl believed it held in the negotiations.”

5. Yes, you read that right: Alabama lost to Vanderbilt this year. This probably didn’t need a footnote but honestly you should feel lucky I don’t just make every post ALABAMA LOST TO VANDERBILT in 139 point font.

6. Hey, nothing to add here. Just wanted to talk about how Alabama lost to Vandy again.

7. IN FOOTBALL! ALABAMA lost to VANDY IN FOOTBALL!

8. almost every conference, because my dream of playoff-relevant MACtion didn’t pan out. Next year.