The 2024-2025 College Football season concluded with a thrilling National Championship, which saw the Ohio State Buckeyes end its 10-year championship drought with a 34-23 victory over the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. But was Ohio State deserving of their playoff berth?
College Football debuted their new 12-team playoff format, promoted to give non-power conference teams a shot, albeit one shot, at a national title.
Previously, college football used a four-team playoff bracket that was independently chosen by the College Football Playoff (CFP) Committee. This format was heavily criticized. Mainly for the fact that it was very hard for teams that were not in the South Eastern Conference (SEC), Big 10 conference, or Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) to make the CFP.
In the decade of the four-team CFP, only 16 unique teams made the playoffs. In those 10 years, only one non-power conference team made the CFP, the 2021 Cincinnati Bearcats. They were given the chance to play the No. 1 ranked team in the nation and defending national champion Alabama Crimson Tide. Cincinnati lost 27-6 to Alabama in a non-competitive Cotton Bowl game.
In 2023, College Football decided to expand to the 12-team playoff format. These changes were advertised to give college football more parody.
Given that the playoff expanded, it makes sense that new teams were going to be first-time participants. Five unique teams made this year’s 12-team CFP: Big XII champions Arizona State, Penn State, Tennessee, Indiana and SMU. Penn State was the only team to win, but it promised new and exciting matchups.
That promise would be short-lived.
The five conference champions went 0-5 in their playoff games. Clemson and ASU lost close games to Texas. Oregon suffered a humiliating loss in the Rose Bowl at the hands of Ohio State, once trailing 34-0 late in the first half. Boise State was trounced by Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl and Georgia was shocked in their postponed Sugar Bowl by Notre Dame.
Why did all four conference champions lose? Georgia gets a pass here since they lost starting quarterback Carson Beck to a torn UCL that he suffered in the SEC championship game. All four teams had to stop playing football for a month because of the NCAA dead period. These teams could not use the time that they had to set gameplans for an opponent that the first round teams got to do.
Between the end of championship weekend and their first playoff game, Ohio State could plan how to beat Tennessee, their first-round matchup, and Oregon, whom they had already played.
The simple fix to give teams each an equal opportunity to gameplan for each other is to reseed after the first round. Yes, Ohio State was the eighth seed in the playoff, but they were not the eighth-best team in the nation. The CFP and Associated Press (AP) ranked them sixth in their final rankings. Why should the rankings pause because of the postseason? After a dominating performance over Tennessee in the first round, the rankings would have Ohio State over teams like Texas and Notre Dame.
A crazier idea that would keep things in balance would be to let the four conference champions pick who to play. This would create great storylines for teams chosen by the top seed and potentially spark new rivalries in the sport.
The new format degrades the value of late-season losses. Ohio State lost a humiliating game to Michigan in the final week of the regular season. An unranked Michigan team that moved the ball as well as a peewee team this season came into Columbus and out-played Ohio State. An unbeaten power-five champion had never missed the playoff until last year when Florida State’s quarterback Jordan Travis suffered a broken leg in their last game. Florida State was punished more severely for losing a quarterback than Ohio State did for losing to an unranked, bottom-tier Big 10 team at the end of the season.
The format is too giving. Indiana should not have been near the CFP this year. 11-1 is a great season, but plenty of teams were around the same mark with similar strengths of schedule. Army was also 11-1, Memphis went 10-2, UNLV went 10-3 but none of these teams ever came close to being as high as Indiana.
In conference, Indiana beat: seventh-place Washington, eighth-place Michigan, eleventh-place Nebraska, fourteenth-place Michigan State, fifteenth-place UCLA, sixteenth-place Northwestern, seventeenth-place Maryland and eighteenth-place Purdue. Indiana played one ranked team, which was Ohio State, and lost 38-15 on Nov. 23.
The format is not all bad, and I think letting teams grow is a huge part of the football season. Notre Dame would not have been in a four-team playoff after a loss to Northern Illinois early in the season. That should have been a season-changing loss, yet they did their job, won their games and had an incredible run to the national championship.
Giving unique teams a chance is great, but the committee needs to understand that there is no perfect bracket, and some teams are going to be left out. It should be the 12 best, not the 12 most deserving teams that make the playoff, and that notion should stick with the committee from now on. Who a team plays should matter, because the precedent now has been set for teams to pick on bottom-feeders in their conference.
In a perfect world, these should have been the at-large teams: Texas, Penn State, Notre Dame, Miami, Ohio State, South Carolina, and SMU.
Another flaw in this format is bowl season in general. Ask any older college football fan and they will tell you that the bowl games were the pinnacle of the college football season. Non-playoff bowl games are no more than spring games for some teams at this point. The transfer portal opens before the end of the season and players opt-out because of potential injury which could hurt their draft stock. With New Year’s Six bowl games being reserved for the playoff, giving teams that just missed the playoff the chance to play in an Orange Bowl or a Fiesta Bowl would give meaning back to non-playoff bowl games for players and increase the likelihood that they do not opt out.
The first-round teams that have incredible seasons and should be playing for these prestigious bowls get nothing and are not credited with a bowl appearance. A losers bracket would be great to give these teams some compensation for having a great season. A way to reward the teams that just missed the playoff would be great to curb opt-outs and create more interesting matchups. College basketball has a ‘Not in Tournament’ bracket that gives electric moments for fans. Give the NIT two bowl games for the first four teams that missed the CFP.
Bowl eligibility as a whole adds issues that exponentially diminish the value of bowl games. With how much money is made because of the ridiculous bowl games, this will never happen, but eligibility should be raised to seven wins. Teams going to bowl games should not have the ability to end with losing records.
With these plans, you spread the New Year’s Six games out across three brackets. The main playoff gets two bowl games for the semi-final game and the first and quarterfinal rounds are hosted at the higher seed’s home stadium. Another two bowl games will go to the losers bracket, and the last two bowl games go to the NIT bracket.
The 12-team playoff will undoubtedly improve as the CFP committee improves upon its selection process. The added teams brought much needed depth to the CFP. Just like with the expansion from the BCS to the CFP, it will take time to get things right but it is a great step forward for College Football. The core of college football will always be bowl season.