College football is a massive sport in the United States and is watched almost more than the NFL. College football constantly changes and new rules are being made to improve the experience. College football underwent massive changes this year, including how players are paid. However, the most significant change was expanding the playoff at the end of the year from a 4-team playoff to a 12-team playoff. The college football playoff format started in the 2014-15 season as a 4-team playoff. The 4-team playoff worked for a while, but there are more than four deserving teams almost every year, and there has been a lot of controversy over teams that should or should not have made the playoffs over the past 10 years of the 4-team playoff. The playoff expanding to 12 teams removes a lot of controversy, making it so that teams that deserve to make the playoffs end up in the playoffs. Even though there are a lot of positives, there are still negatives that will hopefully be fixed over time since this is just the first year.
I prefer the new 12-team playoff and I believe that most of the issues this year will be fixed and the playoff will improve over time. Since this is the first year, there will be some rough areas. One huge improvement is the new playoff gives many teams a chance that they wouldn’t even dream of making the playoffs, which has already happened this year with teams like Boise State, Arizona State and Southern Methodist University making the playoffs for the first time in a while or even the first time at all. With teams that wouldn’t ever make the playoffs, making it for the first time brings some issues with games not being competitive. This was shown in the first round of the playoff where the closest game was Texas vs Clemson, where Texas beat them by 14 points. The rest of the games were blowouts but I imagine this won’t happen yearly.
Another good thing is that the 12-team playoff format brings back value to the conference championships. Before, the 12-team playoff conference championships meant almost nothing and had no playoff implications. Teams in the 4-team playoff would have preferred not being in the conference championship game because it would only hurt them. In the new 12-team playoff, the conference champions of all the top conferences are granted a free spot in the playoff, regardless of whether they were to make it or not. One concept that needs to be changed is that they gave the conference champions a first-round bye, ensuring they went straight to the second round without playing the first. This made it so that some teams that were not the best were given byes to the second round, leading other, better teams to play an extra game. This is proven by the fact that every team that received a bye lost in their first game. This can be an easy fix if they decide to grant the conference champions still a bid to the playoff, but not automatically going to the second round unless deserved.
College football has always used a system at the end of each year where, based on how a team played in the season, they would either make the 4 team playoff or get placed into a bowl game if they had a strong enough year. The bowl games are just single games played by two teams and the winner would get some sort of trophy. The issue with the bowl games is that they don’t mean anything so fans don’t care about them. Many players drop out of them, so teams will have to play their backups. The 12-team playoff gives a chance for more teams to have something to play for at the end of the season, and it gives the fans a lot more entertaining, meaningful games to watch because instead of three games that everyone watches, there are 11. The playoff format brings a lot of excitement, and the fans have much more fun watching it than before.
The 12-team playoff is the right answer. The playoff has had its ups and downs this year, but it has been exciting, fun and way better than previous years. The downs are easily fixable and expected in their first year. Overall, I’m excited to watch the championship this year and for the years to come. I’m also interested to see the changes they keep making to the playoffs and college football.