The Underwhelming 12-Team Playoff

College Football used to have the most exciting and controversial regular season in all of sports. In the name of fairness, they have been working hard to undo that.

History of the National Champion

From the beginning of college football until 1998, the national champion was crowned without a national championship game at all. This meant that the regular season—and standing in the eyes of the press—meant everything.

From 1998 until 2014, the national champion was determined by a single elimination game between the #1 and #2 teams in the country. This process, known as the Bowl Champion Series, was electric—if controversial. The regular season was still paramount, because there was no room for error, but the fans still got to enjoy a single elimination game for all of the marbles.

But the process was opaque and ultimately, too ripe for criticism. This led to college football adopting the playoff in 2014. From 2014 until 2023, college football was determined by a four-team playoff. Thirteen selectors used criteria of their own devising to rank a four-team field. And, arguably, they made no meaningful mistakes during that 9 year run.

Yet this too proved to be too suspect of a process. It was not right that mighty Florida schools like Florida State and Central Florida be left out of the playoff despite perfect records. So the playoff has been expanded yet again to twelve teams.

To what end?

What is college football hoping to achieve? Are they hoping to create more valuable television properties? They may be doing this. But they may also be undercutting the value of the regular season. It will be hard to tell as conference realignment has created some of the most interesting regular season matchups we have seen in some time—at least in the SEC. The other conferences are mostly not playing interesting football.

Despite the Big Ten’s perch atop the college football playoff rankings, the SEC has had a hold on eyeballs. Of the 25 most watched games this season, more than half have been SEC games. The top-rating Georgia-Texas game did almost 4-million viewers better than the top-rating Big Ten game: Oregon-Ohio State.

For it’s part, ESPN has committed more than $1B per year to the college football playoff—so they are hoping that the new properties outdraw the previous bowl game properties. As college football teams struggle to understand their economics in the post-NIL world, ESPN’s billion-dollar offer could be all the reason the sport needed to spring for the playoff.

But will it actually make a difference on the field?

First off, it is important to note that if the system runs long enough, poorly ranked teams will win. Multiple 4th seeded teams won during the nine-year four-team CFP, including Ohio State in the very first season of the college football playoff, and an Alabama team with two NFL quarterbacks on the roster.

Sometimes the regular season does an inadequate job of differentiating between the truly elite teams.

We talked about this problem with baseball. Because baseball teams play their 162 game season in a mostly arbitrary fashion, they throw away a lot of information. A better solution would be to break the season up into increasingly competitive play.

College football should have three objectives during it’s regular season: (1) separate the great teams from the rest, (2) generate revenue and attract eyeballs, (3) sustain fan-favorite rivalry games.

The easiest way to do this would be with some form of flexible scheduling where the leagues only partially assigned conference games, leaving from 1 to 3 games on each team’s schedule where only the home team was scheduled. Then, two or three weeks before the game, the league could announce the opponent to create the most competitive (informative) matchup.

This would have minimal disruption for in-stadium fans, and provide the best experience to television fans. Further, competitive matchups should attract eyeballs and generate the most revenue. An uncompetitive Ohio State - Indiana matchup garnered nearly 10M viewers last week because of the status of the teams. Had the Big Ten not had that game on their schedule, they should have made it.

A case and point is the other side of the Big Ten: Oregon. Oregon has played only one meaningful game this season: a narrow win against Ohio State. Ohio State has played against three teams currently in the top-10. Georgia played five teams ranked in the top twenty. We know much more about Georgia and Ohio State than we do about Oregon.

Lastly, we need to ask, will the 12-team playoff really help us find the best team? The distance between teams at the top of college football is often tight.

Last year, Michigan narrowly made the title game after beating Alabama in overtime. The previous year, Georgia needed a single point to escape Ohio State. In 2018, Alabama beat Georgia in overtime for the title. The two years before that, less than a touchdown separated Clemson and Alabama.

Some years, we’ll have incredible teams that blow everyone away and render the playoff meaningless. Other times, we’ll have a scrum at the top where the champion’s claim to be the best rests solely on having escaped the gauntlet of the playoff—regardless of the merit of their competitors.

In short, the 12-team playoff is not the most impactful thing that college football could do to help identify a national championship—but some years it will give us good football. And in the other years, at least it’s ESPN that’s paying for it and not us.