Year 1 of the 12-Team College Football Playoff: A Mixed Bag of Wins and Losses

A landmark season ends Monday night with the College Football Playoff championship matchup between Notre Dame and Ohio State. For many fans, the title round marks the culmination of a decades-long dream.

For others, the expanded playoff dealt a crucial blow to the identity of a game that was unique among team sports. Both perspectives have arguments with merit.

WINS

Access for Outsiders

An inherent flaw with the BCS was that it was designed to bar half of the sport from competing for the national championship. Sure, undefeated teams from the non-automatic qualifier conferences were technically eligible to play in the BCS Championship Game, but none ever actually did so.

Utah’s snub in the 2008 season was egregious enough that it prompted talk of an antitrust lawsuit, which either set in motion the move to a playoff or expedited the process. The four-team Playoff expanded opportunity, but as UCF discovered in 2017, that opportunity didn’t extend.

Cincinnati’s inclusion in the 2021 season’s Playoff exposed the mostly unrealistic standard required for outsiders to make the four-team field. The Bearcats needed consecutive undefeated regular seasons, along with an unusually topsy-turvy campaign among the power conferences.

With the five automatic bids in the revamped Playoff, leagues beyond the autonomy four now have opportunities they were long denied. That Boise State was the first representative was also poetic, given how consistently the program knocked on the door during the BCS years.

Plenty to Play For

This first 12-team Playoff championship, featuring a two-loss team, underscores the system’s game-changing impact. But it’s Notre Dame, perhaps more so than Ohio State, that highlights the positive of a larger field keeping more teams’ title hopes alive.

In the past, the Irish’s Week 2 loss to Northern Illinois would have been a killer—and that much is evident in Notre Dame being ranked fifth in the committee’s final poll. The Fighting Irish’s ability to successfully regroup and build a winning streak of 14 games, which they carry into Atlanta, reflects positively on the Playoff’s influence on the regular season.

The regular-season stakes seemingly had a trickle-down effect into the postseason, too. Opt-outs and new transfer rules rendered bowls a shadow of what they once were, but this year’s games featured more established stars.

Noteworthy examples, like Kyle McCord shining for Syracuse in the Holiday Bowl and Iowa State’s upperclassmen cementing the program’s best-ever season in the Pop-Tarts Bowl, helped renew some of bowl season’s lost luster.

1st Round On-Campus Games

College football cathedrals—Notre Dame, Beaver, Darrell K. Memorial, and Ohio Stadium—made for ideal backdrops to usher in a new era of the sport.

Although the 1st round games were mostly non-competitive (more on that in a bit), the raucous home audiences combined tradition with progress.

The atmosphere of those games came off so well that a strong case could be made for moving the quarterfinals on campus as well.

LOSSES

Bloated Conferences Manipulated Records

Ironically enough, the expansion of the postseason led directly to the expansion of conferences, most notably the Big Ten and SEC. The 12-team format may well have been more intriguing with the conference landscape that existed before the seismic shift of 2024—or even prior to the reshuffling of 2010.

However, the monopolization of playoff bids was exactly why college football’s preeminent leagues expanded. For the Big Ten in particular, the move paid dividends, but it did so at the expense of both the regular season and the Playoff’s credibility.

Indiana, the fourth Big Ten team in the field, had a great season—one of the best in program history. The Hoosiers also beat exactly one team that finished the season with a record above .500, while losing their two Top 25 matchups by a combined 33 points in games that played out considerably more lopsided than the final score indicated.

Put simply, Indiana was not a Playoff-caliber team, and that would have been exposed in the regular season—if the bloated Big Ten scheduling didn’t shake out so favorably. Indiana didn’t just avoid title-game participants and Oregon and Penn State, but also Top 25-ranked Illinois, eight-win Iowa, Minnesota, and a talented USC team that played a variety of opponents tough in defeat.

And while Texas acquitted itself more favorably in the Playoffs, the Longhorns were bereft of a Top 25 win prior to beating Arizona State in the quarterfinals.

Bad 1st Round Matchups

Through the decade of the four-team Playoff, there was never a season in which 12 teams deserved to play for the national championship. Ditto the BCS seasons.

Unless the Playoff plans to invite each conference champion in the future—which, given some of the grousing already coming out of SEC Country after a team like Clemson landed in the field, fat chance—a 12-team bracket is unnecessary.

1st Round games that are blowouts on paper could be a lot more interesting if they came with the possibility of a March Madness-like Cinderella upset. American Athletic Conference Army may not have fared any better at Penn State than at-large entrant SMU did, but the reward of such an upset outweighs the likelihood of a rout.

Given how often the semifinals in the four-team Playoff were lopsided, don’t dismiss this year’s ugly 1st Round games as first-year outliers either.

Taking Importance Away from Conference Championships

The first 12-team Playoff final four, featuring zero teams with conference championships, reflected an unfortunate new reality in college football. The sport’s identity was long established on regional rivalries and the bragging rights associated with league titles.

Prioritizing national championships already stripped some of the significance from conference titles, like when Ohio State made the 2016 Playoff over Penn State and Alabama won the 2017 season’s Playoff despite finishing second in the SEC West.

However, the new format deemphasized conference titles exponentially compared to its postseason predecessors—and it’s likely to only get worse. Reserving 1st Round byes for conference champions was intended to maintain some importance on league play, but when teams like Arizona State and Boise State earned those spots, the bellyaching from power brokers foreshadowed what’s almost assuredly to come.

Of course, that complaining preceded the 1st Round byes looking to be more negative than positive. With all four of the conference champs that advanced to the quarterfinals immediately ousted, coming off month-long hiatuses, it sure seems like winning your conference and having a layoff is more of a detriment than an advantage.

VERDICT: Loss

Year 1 of the 12-team Playoff provided plenty of positives. And if the Notre Dame-Ohio State matchup produces an instant classic, that might well compensate for many of the negatives.

And our football-crazy nation will eventually grow accustomed to the changes that came as a direct result of the playoffs. Until then, though, the absence of the Pac-12 loomed large around 11 p.m. ET every Saturday. The overstuffed conferences made for frustration and imbalance that’s impossible to ignore and not easily fixed.

The equally unavoidable complaining that comes with postseason snubs continues now, only now transferred from one-loss teams with a legitimate claim to play for a championship to three-loss teams like South Carolina.

Texas-Arizona State and both semifinals were great, but we had to sift through an awful lot of filler to get to those payoffs, which perhaps explains declining TV ratings.

And, as a means of crowning a champion, is it a significant enough improvement that it warranted dramatic changes to the very identity of college football? Early returns suggest not.

That could change in future seasons. Even if it doesn’t though, college football fans would be best to heed the words of Ric Flair: “Whether you like it or not, learn to love it.” The 12-team Playoff is going nowhere.