We fixed the College Football Playoff (and the offseason calendar) in 45 minutes
The commissioners who run the College Football Playoff finally — after five years of deliberation — put the finishing touches on the 12-team format Tuesday. That format will debut this season. But since no good idea can last too long in college sports, those commissioners began planning on Wednesday to expand the tournament beginning in 2026.
They’ll argue about this for about a month before choosing another format that they might ditch within a few years. But they don’t need to spend a month debating on Zoom and in person. Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports and I solved for all their issues in about 45 minutes on Friday morning’s edition of Andy Staples On3.
Seriously. We revised the calendar. We came up with an absurdly fun playoff format. And it’s probably something reasonable commissioners could agree upon and adopt. Hell, they could always scrap it later when the ACC breaks up, when the athletes are employees or when the first collective bargaining agreement gets signed. But for now, this would rock.
The commissioners can waste their time bloviating, or they can take this plan and spend all that time in those luxury hotels by the pool instead of in the meeting room. Let’s fix this…
Playoff format: 16 teams, no automatic bids
I like the 12-team format that has been meticulously crafted over the past four years. I wish they’d leave it alone. But since they won’t, let’s talk about the number. At the behest of the Big Ten and SEC, commissioners are discussing a 14-team format that would grant multiple automatic bids for the two most powerful and lucrative leagues. This could be as many as four automatic bids each for the Big Ten and SEC and two each for the ACC and Big 12. The highest-ranked Group of Five champ also would get an auto bid. That’s as many as 13 auto bids, which likely would rankle Notre Dame or attempt to chase it into a conference.
I suspect the Big Ten and SEC would be satisfied with three, though. They can “trade” the extra auto bids that they don’t actually need and make them at-larges in exchange for a larger revenue share. This is a classic negotiating ploy: Pretend to care about something that doesn’t matter and then swap it for something you actually want.
But the best method is 16 at-large bids and zero automatic qualifiers. If you want an NFL-style, objective, standings-based model for making the playoff, then you’ll need a superleague that gets split into regionally and competitively balanced divisions. Maybe college football is headed there as the Big Ten and SEC consume the rest of the sport, but it’s not there yet. So instead let’s lean into the subjectivity and conference pride that make November arguments so much fun.
Why 16? Because it provides the most access while keeping the same number of rounds as the 12-team model. Any more adds games. And 14 just seems like a way for the Big Ten and SEC to prop up their conference title games by attempting to guarantee their champs the only byes. This way, the No. 1 seed plays the No. 16 seed. The top four seeds aren’t protected for conference champions as they are now because that’s only going to throw the bracket out of whack when the second-best team in the country is the No. 5 seed. (Which will happen fairly quickly.)
This wouldn’t guarantee access for a Group of Five team every year, but it would virtually guarantee access for Group of Five teams that deserve to play in the tournament and could actually win games in the tournament. Nine Group of 5 teams (2015 Houston-8, 2016 Western Michigan-15, 2017 UCF-12, 2018 UCF-8, 2020 Cincinnati-8, 2020 Coastal Carolina-12, 2021 Cincinnati-4, 2021 BYU-13, 2022 Tulane-16) would have made such a tournament in the 10 seasons of the CFP. Western Michigan and Coastal Carolina are the only teams on that list still in the Group of 5, but others can rise. This would prevent a team from being purely a sacrificial lamb, and it would allow for real access.
Dan suggested this might be lawsuit bait, so I’m willing to compromise and have the five highest-ranked conference champions get automatic bids to guarantee one Group of 5 school makes the field, but none of the champs should get any seed protection.
Either way, the Big Ten and SEC would still get three or four teams each into the field. The ACC and Big 12 probably would average about two teams a year. But no one would be locked into forcing in a team from one of those leagues that would just get smashed.
Playoff sites: On-campus until the national title game or on-campus until permanent Rose/Sugar Bowl semifinals
The best place to play college football is on campus. No one ever left a game at the Big House, the Swamp or Autzen Stadium saying “You know what would have made that better? Playing in an antiseptic dome in Atlanta.” The games should be on campus.
Contrary to what overpaid and underworked bowl directors will tell you, this would not kill the bowls. Bowls are reliable ratings events that can be produced at a relatively low cost. There still would be plenty of postseason games on your television. The director of the Outback Bowl (or whatever it’s called now) just might not be able to buy a beach house and a ski chalet. You shouldn’t care about that, and neither should the commissioners.
Put the games on campus. Make the seedings matter.
Ignore the silly arguments from the people who spent their careers getting greased by bowl executives. What about visiting fans? (Who cares? Their team should have won more games in the regular season.) Could the college towns handle the crowds? (Yes. They do it seven times a year already.) Where would the media stay? (Don’t worry about us. We’re used to staying two hours away to cover big regular-season games.)
Those are all real arguments that have been used against more playoff games on campus. Ignore them. They’re idiotic.
Dan offered one compromise that could work as well. He suggested making the Rose and Sugar bowls the permanent semifinal sites on Jan. 1. That would be great. The Rose Bowl is the second-best place (behind on any campus) to watch a college football game. New Orleans is the best big event city in America. Dan’s only demand is that the Rose Bowl kicks off an hour earlier — sunset be damned) so that the Sugar can kick off at a decent hour for the people who have to go to work on Jan. 2.
The biggest change: No conference championship games
The biggest flaw in the current 12-team model is that it makes finishing No. 3 in your conference better than finishing No. 2. The No. 2 team has to play an extra game (that it loses) while the No. 3 team gets a week to rest up for the playoff.
So let’s eliminate the conference title games, which have outlived their usefulness.
This would get the most pushback from commissioners because conference title games are lucrative TV properties. In the Big Ten and SEC, they are cash cow events in terms of TV revenue and on-site revenue. This is another reason to go to 16 teams instead of 14. Jumping from 12 teams to 14 would add two more first-round games — probably worth about $100 million each to ESPN. Go to 16 and that adds two more games without adding a round. That’s an additional $400 million in revenue (over the 12-team format) that could offset any losses from eliminating the conference title games. And, since the Big Ten and SEC make more off their title games than anyone else, they should be able to strongarm a larger share of that extra money to ensure this is a net positive for them from a revenue standpoint.
Meanwhile, this would allow the season to end on Thanksgiving weekend. Army-Navy gets played the next week. The Heisman Trophy isn’t voted on until after the CFP. Then the CFP starts on the second Saturday in December. This allows for semifinals on Jan. 1, either on campus or in the Rose/Sugar.
Eliminate the early National Signing Day and return the extravaganza to the first Wednesday in February
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has suggested moving the early signing day from the third Wednesday in December to the first Wednesday in December. This doesn’t really make any college coach’s life easier, nor does it change much for the high schoolers who will be signing without the kind of information they might have two months later. It also will accelerate the coach-firing/hiring process. No one is getting fired on the Sunday after the end of the regular season if signing day is Wednesday. Schools will fire coaches on Halloween and start lining up replacements while those coaches are still coaching their current teams in the regular season. It’s a mess waiting to happen.
Plus, there’s a reason the NFL Draft isn’t held on wild-card weekend. Save your big offseason news days for the actual offseason.
Return to one signing day for football in February. That way, the winter transfer portal window will have closed. (Sankey and company want to eliminate that transfer window. It’s not happening. The second they try, they’ll get dragged into court and a temporary restraining order or injunction will restore the winter window or possibly just open the portal all year. So they need to learn to live with it until the players are employees in a few years and sign contracts.) Coaches will know how many scholarships they have and what positions they need to fill. If coaches want time off, schools can enact NCAA rules to make March and July recruiting dead periods.
Plus, the players who wish to enroll early would still be on campus in January. Just as they did before the early signing period existed.
Other than dropping the conference title games — which they don’t have to do if they don’t want to — none of these suggestions is any more extreme than anything on the table now. In fact, they’d make the sport run smoother and would give it a fun finish every season.
This all could get done with one Zoom call. But it won’t. It’s college football. It can never be that easy.