While enthusiastically announcing plans to expand the College Football Playoff, those in charge of the postseason system downplayed the revenue windfall that will come with tripling the number of participants and declined to speculate about whether a new format will tap the brakes on conference realignment.
Instead, they stuck to a strict script, touting how many more athletes will get to play games with national championship implications and how many more fans will get to root for playoff contenders.
“It will be a new day for college football,” Mississippi State President Mark Keenum said late last week after the announcement billed as “historic.”
No doubt.
Expanding the College Football Playoff from four to 12 teams will fundamentally change the sport on the field and off — for better or worse.
More regular-season games will have playoff implications, but the biggest games will no longer have winner-take-all tension.
The new format will break up a conference caste system fortified by the four-team model, but it won’t stop the growing gap between haves and have nots.
More teams will play in the championship tournament and bowl games that are suffering from player apathy will be replaced by playoff games.
But a larger field probably won’t increase the number of teams that have a realistic chance of winning the whole thing.
How soon expansion will come is still to be determined. As soon as 2024, but no later than 2026.
“Overall, it’s a day for celebration,” CFP Executive Director Bill Hancock said.
Maybe.
The Game of the Century, that in-season matchup of highly ranked teams with seemingly everything on the line, has gone from being a staple of college football to an endangered species. The 12-team playoff will now make it extinct and redefine what it means to play an important regular-season game.
Let’s use last year’s Ohio State-Michigan game as an example. The Wolverines not only broke a long losing streak in the rivalry, but they eliminated the Buckeyes from both Big Ten and playoff contention.
Under a 12-team playoff, that game is for seeding and a first-round bye.
The flip side is that under the new format, any team that enters the final month of the season with a chance to win its conference is a playoff contender.
