December 6, 2023 By: Mark Knudson

12-team playoff alone won’t fix College Football

Follow Mark on Twitter/X @markknudson41

Florida State’s snub by the College Football Playoff committee is being brushed off by many who think things will be a lot different starting next year.

Newsflash: College football will still be a disorganized mess. Playoff expansion isn’t going to usher in much of a cleanup, not the way things are set up right now.

For starters, the CFP committee isn’t going away.

There’s still going to be a large element of figure skating-style “judging” when it comes to who is granted permission to participate. Sure, in the future we’re talking about the 13^th and 14^th ranked teams that will have a gripe. Oklahoma, ranked 12^th in the final poll, would have had that gripe this year, being left out in favor of Conference USA champion Liberty, whom the Sooners would likely boatrace if they played them, but that’s not the point.

Ever since it’s inception, the CFP has fallen back on the nebulous “Four Best Teams” argument, “best” being entirely subjective. They show favoritism to the SEC (doesn’t everyone in the sport?) and often times can’t fully explain why their rankings turned out like they did. Now they’ll be forced to reconcile the whole “best” argument when six spots will be earned and six will be subjective.

Here’s a radical idea: Let’s make future playoff participants as much about the most deserving teams as possible…like the NFL does.

The sport is quickly hurtling toward becoming a mini-NFL. Sometime soon student-athletes are going to start being designated as employees of the University, meaning scholarships will then become taxable income. All remnants of amateurism will soon be history. The pros don’t have a committee pick ANY playoff participants. Every spot is earned, even when a particular division is having a down year.

There’s reasonable and easy step for the NCAA to take that will remove the “Russian judge” from the equation…well, at least take the influence of him or her down several meaningful pegs.

First, we need to return to divisional play for the Power Four. Have eight reasonably sized divisions between them and have each team play every team in their division during the regular season. That would leave the Big 10 with three non-conference games to schedule whomever they wanted to. The other three conferences would have room for four non-conference foes.

The ACC North could be Boston College, Cal, Louisville, Notre Dame, Pitt, SMU, Stanford, Syracuse and Wake Forest.

The ACC South could be Clemson, Duke, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Miami, North Carolina, NC State, Virginia and Virginia Tech.

The Big 10 East could be Indiana, Illinois, Ohio State, Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, Penn State, Purdue and Rutgers.

The Big 10 West could Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Northwestern, Oregon, UCLA, USC, Wisconsin and Washington.

The Big 12 East could be Baylor, Central Florida, Cincinnati, Houston, Iowa State, Oklahoma State, TCU and West Virginia.

The Big 12 West could be Arizona, Arizona State, BYU, Colorado, Kansas, Kansas State, Texas Tech and Utah.

The SEC East could be Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee and Vanderbilt.

And the SEC West, Arkansas, LSU, Missouri, Mississippi, Mississippi State, Oklahoma, Texas and Texas A&M.

Let’s be honest. Next year’s conference alignments are just stupid. Not sure how anyone with any common sense would argue on behalf of Stanford and Cal being in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and that’s just one of the elements of stupidity. As things stand, the Big 10 will be the Bloated 18 next year, with no divisions and a meaningless championship game that will perhaps be a rematch from the week before – or could have the participants decided by some sort of convoluted tie-breaker system, like the Big 12 did this season.

Conferences without divisions are destined to end up deciding championship game participants via those convoluted tiebreakers or worse, with computer programs, like the Mountain West was forced to use to break a three-way tie for this year’s MW conference title. Two of the teams didn’t face each other during the regular season, so the tiebreakers were useless.

And rematches, like we would have gotten in the Big 10 this year under next year’s format, are arguably even worse.

Break the Bloated 18 into two divisions of nine teams each, and a worthy division champ will emerge from the East and the West. Remember, Washington, USC, Oregon and UCLA would be part of the new Bloated 18 West next season if the conference did the smart thing.

Same goes for the three other Power Four 16-team leagues. Split them up by East/West or North/South and the winner of each eight-team division will have earned a playoff spot too.

And these four mega-conferences will no longer need a meaningless conference championship game.

The Group of Five conferences – each of whom should also go back to divisional play – can keep their conference title games, with the highest ranked champion getting the access berth they’ve long been promised…and deserve.

The other three CFP bids will remain “at large” and subject to that Russian Judge. Nothing can be perfect.

Do it this way, and at least then we’d have teams who earned their way into the playoff and didn’t get there as a result of reputation or bias.