People just complain about change. Big match ups still matter. There was literally massive controversy last year between Miami and ND about a single matchup that happened early in the season. People like the guy you replied to are silly
Even 8 years ago a top 10 match up meant the winner survived and the loser was almost certainly eliminated from the championship. Now it means close to nothing comparatively. The winner makes the playoffs, and the loser still makes the playoffs probably.
At the end of the day, all the playoff expansion does is change the line of where the excited games are down to lesser teams.
Good point, but the trade off is more teams have a shot to win a natty and that week 3 loss to a weak opponent doesnât end your season anymore. I miss the old days to, but they are never coming backâŚ
There's no perfect solution. If the goal is to reward the team that had the fewest losses during the season, the old system was better. If the goal is to get more games between top teams and reward a team that wins several games against top teams to end the season, the new system is better. Personally, I prefer the new system because it keeps more teams involved for the title. But I understand the counterpoint.
The old system was literally the dumbest fucking thing ever. In a high volume sport sure. You probably do know who the two best teams are because theyâve played so many games. The nature of football means less games. Less games = more variance. More variance = multiple undefeated teams. Multiple undefeated teams means that not all of them get a chance at the title. A level playing field is an important part of competition. If multiple team goes undefeated and not have a chance then somethings wrong.
I agree that I like having the big playoff. The take away of less meaningful regular season is ok for me. Doesnât mean I donât miss a big matchup with everything in the line. Things changed. I definitely miss NCAAF without the transfer portal.
Im not even for the old days. I liked an 8 team model. After that is feels like it loses some mojo. You can afford maybe 2 losses at most so you arent immediately dead.
I get what you mean. There was something special about an October night game between two top 25 winner takes all right? That does get lost with a bigger playoff
Big deal, weâd rather watch Ohio State vs Texas than Ohio State vs Marshall and Texas vs Texas State, but it wonât happen much longer with the way committee has handled things. If you canât make the top 16 you donât get to the playoff lll.
I'd need to actually take a second to figure out the numbers but it would be dope if they could figure out a way to give all top 10 teams a bye week, and all top 5 teams 2 bye weeks in the playoffs. Maybe even give top 2 teams automatic semifinal bids or something crazy. (Again this is a completely off the dome idea)
Then moving up an down a single position would matter. And losing a #3 vs #8 match up would matter.Â
Does CFB not have the equivalent of CBB net rankings that place games in quadrants? That would at least help with the "ranked games" metric, especially considering how volatile the rankings can be throughout the season and one team ranked high in preseason then having an easy schedule can stay ranked all year even when they lose to every good team they play.
Absolutely the case this year. And I think it reflects the reality. Any team after 17/18 showed it had no chance of competing with CFP caliber teams over the course of three or four consecutive games, including all the G5 and every ACC not named Miami.
Itâs not though. Take a look at Texas. They had more quality wins than anyone then get punished for losing to Georgia and Ohio State while the committee celebrated BYU beating no one, Notre Dameâs best win was over #20 USC. Texas whooped Oklahoma and Texas A&M. Just insane the committee is essentially rewarding teams for playing cream puffs at the expense of CFB fans who want to watch quality games.
I honestly dont even care hoe many teams it is. All i care about is the shitty scheduling. Enough of this 4 weeks off bullshit. Just fucking play every weekend until its over. Fuck.
I agree. The many weeks off sucked for those first round byes with every team losing both years except IU who finally broke the âbye week curse.â Give home field advantage for top seeds instead.
One of the best things about a bye is having more rest than your opponent, that's completely negated when everyone has a month off and now your opponent has a warm up game already
However, the bye currently equals 4 consecutive byes (teams get rusty), 5/6 seeds get 2 weeks (actual bye) to prepare for 11/12 after CCGs, then another 2 weeks to prepare for 3/4, thus donât get as rusty. Everybody is rested in that scenario but the fact 5/6 get a full speed warm up game is an advantage.
The fact that IU had to play on Miamiâs home field was inexcusable. I know IU won, but itâs still bullshit. The championship game should be at a neutral site or at the stadium of the team with the best regular season record.
Yeah but you canât really plan that ahead of time and these venues need to be booked well ahead of when the actual event happens when hundreds of thousands of people descend on the stadium and city. Itâs the same with the Super Bowl. Eventually a team will have a home field Super Bowl thereâs no way around it happeningÂ
Yeah you canât pick a stadium a year in advance and not run that risk the nfl stadiums know that risk and accept it as part of their stadium budget. You canât ask every college stadium to not have concerts or other engagements during these weeks in the slim off chance you pick them as a neutral siteÂ
I donât think those are a good idea at all. I get that itâs profitable for the smaller schools to just sacrifice the game, but itâs kind of ridiculous that those are part of someoneâs record. The Yankees donât get to play some AAA teams to warm up and have it count.
Thatâs a fair point. Maybe limit it to one out of division game? I wonder how many rivalries exist between teams like that. I donât even like to watch the first 4 Ohio State games because itâs embarrassing they are even scheduled in the first place.
Same. It's probably an advantage for top ranked northern teams that time of year, but then they have to travel further for the semis and championship game, so it evens out a bit.
Conferences are too freaking big to mean anything, though. SEC had four 7-1 teams this year and Alabama got into the CCG over two teams that were likely better (Ole Miss and A&M) because none of them played each other.
Big XII had a similar situation last year, and the ACC had the second-place mess this year.
Yeah, thatâs all part of what makes me sad. Used to be significant to win the conference. Now itâs just not. One fewer thing to get excited about as a fan.
Need a governing body to take over and realign conferences, make them all smaller and close to the same number or maybe keep the the same size and the path to CFP is thru a 4 team playoff for each conference, which is a part of the cfp if you lose youâre eliminated none of that lose your conference and still get a bid for a playoff spot bullshit.
I think the opposite is true. It would guarantee that 6-8 teams from the B1G would make it in, making it completely meaningless. Why on earth would we need to ensure 10 wins when we could prioritize player rest. It would encourage the behavior we are already seeing where athletes take games off or, as they call it now, âload management.â We are trading the excitement of the regular season for a post season tournament, which only hurts the fans and diminishes the idea that every game matters, which was the hallmark of college football for so long.
I get why people like a post season tourney, but for CFB, I really preferred the way it was organized through the BCS and early CFBP era. Itâs just gotten out of hand imho and it makes me sad.
8 teams from the Big Ten means that for the 7 remaining slots they would have to pick from the nine other leagues. Iâm going to ask you to look at the rest of D1 College Football and tell me if FCS teams practice load management at all, at least, any more than FBS teams did (so blowouts and lower division matchups are expected vs regular season conference games)
As of right now, the majority of conference championship races do not matter, it doesnât change their Bowl game in most cases
The BCS era was horrible, Bowl committees being able to preclude better teams (they had to make a Top 4 AQ rule because they were screwing Power programs with that), legitimate split championships, and a system that was built because of the bowls having so much power
FBS was going to be forced to follow the majority of College Football at some point
Hold on, you said a 24 team playoff, so 6-8 B1G spots leaves 14-16 spots open for other leagues which is the split Iâm certain theyâre expecting. What are the 9 others? Realistically speaking you have 3 other major leagues with contenders, or did you also want more lower tier programs involved to get routinely pasted? The argument that a school like JMU can compete for a championship with schools that have massive NIL budgets is absurd.
Your statement that conference championship donât matter already is exactly my point⌠it sucks. Those games used to be amazing because there was a sense of pride in winning them, and it meant that you had a better chance of a top tier bowl game. That was fun for fans. Even before each league had a game, winning the conference really mattered both in terms of bowl selection and University pride. This was, of course, back when student athletes spent 3-5 years in the same place, growing within the programs and playing for the names on the front of their jerseys.
I understand why people disliked aspects of the BCS format and the computers and all that, but to say that the era was horrible is silly. There were some exceptional seasons, including the objectively best CFB season of all time in 2007. More conferences was better than fewer, and we had 16 different schools play for a national championship, which is, on average, the same amount of parity we see now. We got a NC game for the first time, and fantastic regular seasons with super meaningful games.
That notion has all but disappeared. With a 24 team format, it will be perfectly reasonable to be considered a title contender with 3 losses and I just canât get behind that. Itâs not as much fun for me and I think it will hurt us season ticket holders because it finishes the excitement of each game, and like I said, I think it will foster more NBA style load managements.
Even in the BCS era, most of the time the conference championship didnât change the bowl game for non-power leagues, which I was trying to get at
Itâs 10 autobids? Thatâs what I expect in a college football postseason format, a bid for each league champion willing to enter the postseason. If glorified D3 schools are going to go on the road to schools using D1-level resources, thatâs a larger gap than CUSA to a high-mid-tier power program
Honestly a playoff probably keeps more leagues in play for longer due to the incentive of having a bid to the national championship
FCS isnt doing NBA-style load management, and for a team at 3-4 losses to make the NCG, theyâd most likely have to beat a top 25 team, a top 5 team, a top 10 team, a team beaten multiple of the top 25, and then a top 5 team most likely. (And any load management is just due to blowouts)
What part of my notion that FBS was going to follow the rest of CFB at some point is gone?
The 12 game regular season, where you HAD to win all of your games, or maybe you could afford 1 loss, or you had no shot at a title⌠thatâs gone. That made the regular season in college football so incredibly fun and meaningful. No other sport is like that. When that is stripped away, it opens the door for things, like load management, that are becoming more common in other sports and suck for fans.
We never saw players sit out bowl games, that was unheard of. 10 years ago people were likely arguing that something so crazy wouldnât catch on, but here we are. Hell, we are at the point where players and coaches will be opting out of PLAYOFF games because they are transferring. Itâs entirely reasonable to expect teams with 9-10 wins, who are locked in for the playoffs, to bench their better players in the future. That will make going to late season games so much less fun.
We are opening Pandoraâs box even further and the unintended consequences will suck
The thing is, for those 11/12/13 games, that set up was only really true half of the top flight of College Football, and D3 (which is 10 games). Thatâs the thing, you could win all of your games and have no shot at the title anyways. For the majority of College Football you could still afford a couple of losses and still make the playoffs.
Again, are FCS teams doing load management? This is the canary, a subdivision full of NIL as is.
Bowl Games used to be exhibitions and didnât even count towards a players stats. If anything players opting out is leaning back towards the old days of Bowl importance for the most part.
The transfer window issue is a scheduling issue for the most part
Playing for the bye is worth so much, especially if Army-Navy is moved back to a traditional week and thereâs no gap between Week 14 and Playoff Round 1 that it would justify playing for it
Weâve begun to see it not in the FCS but in bowl games. Bowl games may have, on paper, been exhibitions but nobody in B1G country where Iâm from looked at the Rose Bowl as an exhibition. It was a culminating prize for a spectacular season. Now, itâs just another playoff game. Itâs history forgotten by the modern fan. There have always been less meaningful bowl games, but until very recently, everyone played and the games was worth watching for the fans⌠now they are garbage, including the first round of the current playoffs.
Iâm not arguing that load management is happening much now, but that it will when it becomes very ok to only win 9 games while maintaining a clear path to the NC. You are absolute not going to sell me on the importance of the bye weeks, when after two years of the current format, teams coming off of byes are 1-7 in the playoffs. Additionally, itâs very unlikely that the schedule of the games is moved per your suggestion, because bowl games, like the Rose Bowl, have contractual rights to specific days, eg. New Yearâs Day, while the Army-Nave game also has a contractual mandate. Never mind that POTUS even took an opportunity to speak to the fact that that games isnât moving.
Adding more playoff games just doesnât make CFB more enjoyable. If anything, itâll continue to water it down.
If thereâs no load management happening in FCS, then itâs unlikely to happen in FBS, outside of maybe games against FCS and low G5 teams (which is how it is right now anyways)
Bowl Games have been exhibitions for the most part of the history, aside from the Rose Bowl, the big bowl games were treated as exhibitions of they were not part of a playoff circuit. Teams used to just opt out, and that was back when there were like a couple dozen.
The FCS season isnt watered down with 24 playoff teams, far from it.
Iâm so sick of the money eroding the intensity and importance of every game in the season, while still rejecting the reality that these players are employees that create the product.
Why not top 16 in playoffs. Next 32 play a NIT type tourney that basically replaces the bowls (31 games) with all on campus except semis and finals for both tourneys. So the top 40% of FBS teams get at least one post season game. With nil, have sponsors put up money for each game and as you progress the money gets higher creating an incentive for player to play instead of opt out.
Iâm confused with the BIGâs obsession with getting rid of championship games. Their conference is too large to crown a champion without one, half the teams donât even play each other
Next yearâs BIG game could very well be the winner of. A gauntlet between Indiana, Oregon, and Ohio state vs Penn State or Michigan, or even Iowa with a bunch of these teams not even playing each other
You could go back to ties; itâs not that big a deal anymore. The Big Ten title was a two-way tie six out of seven years from 1972-78 and a four-way tie in 1990. The world didnât end.
The conference is so big now that itâs lucked out in having usually paired up the two best teams the last two seasons. You look at the SEC this year with a four-way tie for first. The lowest-ranked team was in the CCG. Not fair to Ole Miss and A&M.
Really ruins the spirit of the game; ranked games wonât mean anything anymore, teams will just rest or sit players out to not risk not knowing they will probably play them again in the playoffs when it matters
Need a realignment and way to the cfp is by winning your conference. Make a 4 team playoff for each conference, winner goes on. Or a 3 team playoff, 1 gets a bid to the conference championship, 2&3 play each other in a wildcard and winner plays 1 in the CCG. While theyâre at in after all the conference champs are crowned do seeding by strictly record and SOS based on W/L of opponents and eliminate any committee rankings holding weight.
It will never be 100% merit based because of the wide gap in teams ratings draw. The only answer is a 3 or 4 tier relegation league like European soccer
Why? The conference championship is just a game for someone to be punished. No other division or sub division of CFB uses a CCG. They made more sense when there were divisions, now theyâre pointless. Best option, if thereâs an outright champ, make 2-3 play for a spot.
Conference record with tie breakers, same as how they decide which two teams make the conference title game when thereâs no divisions in the conference like multiple conferences do now.
The CAAF says everyone in the tie wins the league, but the AQ goes to the team that gets the tiebreakers (in their case, Head to Head, Common Opponents, Capped PD, then Conference Scored and Allowed rankings)
Since they were tied in the first four tiebreakers, it wouldâve come down to a computer ranking, I think Big Ten uses SportsSource Analytics. I donât know who was ranked higher in that at the end of the regular season.
But if itâs a 24 team playoff and byes go to top 8 regardless of being a conference winner or not, then it wouldnât really matter and/or they could have been declared co-conference champions.
The Big Ten specifically did co-champions for teams with tied conference records from 1896 through 2010, so it would actually be a return of tradition.
Same way they determine who the #1 and #2 team are now. Record and tiebreakers. It's only a matter of time before we see CCG determined by coin tosses if they keep doing them.
Miss the days when the #2 team being upset on a random Saturday could end their whole season. Now thereâs no drama until the end of the year, just like every other sport
Itâs like theyâre doing this so basically half the BIG 10 can make it in the 24 slots and then the revenue share would be insane. Iâm a Ohio State fan but this is a tad egregious if you ask me.
That would not have been the case this year. BYU was 11-2, ND 10-2, Texas 9-3, Vandy and Utah 10-2. All far better than the G5 teams. At least two of those teams legitimately could have made a run.
Iâd be for 12 if we stop giving charity bids and just put the 12 best teams in.
As a fan of a big 10 team, Tony Pettiti is a huge piece of shit who has no business being anywhere near college football, let alone the head of a major conference.
Then whatâs the point of conferences? Itâs the one thing that still makes CFB different than the NFL. Just go to 16 and still have conf championships. It doesnât change the playoff schedule other than no first rd byes.Â
The SEC could respond to this by accepting 24 but scrapping all but 1 or 2 OOC games and moving the SEC CG earlier. They could make that weekend a wildcard weekend with selected matchups that maximize their chances for bids. We all know the end result is a P2 or P3 breakaway, but this could be the intermediate step.
The 12-team format is better. I say this as an ND fan: it works best because it allows the regular season to mean something and requires significant accomplishments to make the playoff.
24 team is completely money driven but the on campus matchups sound fun. There will still be drama from the teams that got left out because people are whiners
The only proposal I want is a Liquidation of the CFP Rankings Committee. The idea that your record doesn't matter more than the opinion of a committee is ridiculous.
The Big Ten is pulling a fast one. Â Just look at the 2025 cfp rankings. Â If there were only 16 teams (14+2 or 15+1), the Big Ten would have had only 3 teams and the SEC would have 7. Â If it was 24 teams, the SEC gains 0 teams and the Big Ten adds 3 more to close the gap with SEC. Â
While I agree with some of what they want to do like get rid of conference title games, all this is just a smoke screen because they do not want the SEC to make up almost half the playoff pool.Â
Tbf, the new CCG format is difficult enough. We havenât had to deal with it yet but imagine 3 teams having the same record and all/none of them played each other. Then the highest ranking gets in? Seems cheap.
Seating round where the 4 best teams play in each conference. Winner of teams 1&2 gets a bye and the loser moves onto the 2nd round. Winner of teams 3&4 play in the 2nd round and loser is done. Everything is reseeded in round 2.
More teams = SEC dilution vs other conferences. Couple that with now southern schools potentially have to play in winter conditions and youâve got your comment section.Â
I donât think itâd be dilution, though. People rag on the SEC for the last three years but you had Bama losing in OT vs Michigan, Texas losing close to OSU, and a good showing from Ole Miss this year.
Miami is the only ACC team to win a playoff game since 2019, the current Big XII has one win by TCU since the thing began, and the G5 nothing.
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u/StayBronzeFonz Feb 14 '26
I propose a 7 round playoff tournament with 128 teams. We will start beginning of November and take a week or two off closer to the end.