College sports took a sledgehammer to itself a couple of years ago, crippling the Big 12 and destroying the Pac-12 because it could, and because there was money to be made. Who could have guessed that would have negative consequences for the one thing it got right, a 12-team College Football Playoff?
Today, the leaders are looking at an inscrutable playoff race and seem to be realizing, Gee, maybe we have some issues here. Maybe deciding the best teams in leagues with 16 to 18 members is hard to do, since so many of them don’t play each other. Maybe it leads to having wildly imbalanced schedules that prop up one team and tear down another. Maybe getting rid of divisions wasn’t such a great idea after all. Maybe a perfectly good 12-team playoff is no longer good enough for a sport gone mad.
In lobbying for a 16-team field, or Tony Petitti’s odious 24-team concept, commissioners have pointed out that the 12-team model was devised in a different conference landscape. Just remember, commissioners, that’s a you problem. Nobody made the Big Ten add four schools, or the ACC three, or the SEC two. An acknowledgement of leadership’s role in complicating the 12-team playoff before it even had a chance to launch would seem proper.
This is where the sport sits heading into the final weekend of the 2025 regular season. There are six teams still in the running to make the championship game in the Atlantic Coast Conference. There are four in the SEC, Big Ten and Big 12. There are so many tiebreaker scenarios that many fans aren’t even trying to figure them out.
This late-season drama is fun for those who have a horse in the race. But it also underscores the inscrutable sameness of a bunch of 10–2 and 9–3 teams who didn’t settle enough on the field by actually playing each other.
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It’s one thing to try comparing teams with similar records and accomplishments from different conferences. In the new world, it’s an intraleague issue. Is Texas A&M better than Georgia? We don’t know, and may never know if they don’t meet in the SEC championship game. Is Mississippi better than Alabama? Good question. Is Vanderbilt better than Oklahoma? We can only guess.
Among the ACC muddle, Virginia and SMU both are a win away from the league championship game without having played four of the five other teams still in contention. Miami, No. 12 in the CFP Top 25, is the highest-rated ACC team by six spots but might not play in the title game of what could be a one-bid league. That would be a bad look—for the ACC and for the selection committee both.
USC was in the Big Ten race until it finally played one of the top three teams, Oregon, and lost by 15 points. Michigan remains in contention in that league without having confronted a top-three team—that will change Saturday when Ohio State comes to Ann Arbor. Wisconsin, meanwhile, got stuck playing the Buckeyes, Ducks and Indiana.
Some things happen that are unforeseeable and beyond schedule makers’ control—like the rise of the Hoosiers. What looked like a walkover opponent for decades in the Big Ten has become a nightmare matchup in the last two years. Same with Vandy in the SEC.
The committee has been tasked with doing a lot of guesswork—but there is a realistic way to make it worse this weekend. Much worse, actually. All we need are the following results: Texas beats Texas A&M, Miami beats Pittsburgh, Vanderbilt beats Tennessee, Michigan beats Ohio State, BYU beats Central Florida and Utah beats Kansas. Those results would elevate every bubble team, closing the gap between them and those currently on the right side of the at-large bubble—particularly Oklahoma, Notre Dame and Alabama.
I bear no malice toward the committee. But the idea of making them decide who is in and who is out among seven 11–1 teams, seven 10–2 teams and 9–3 Texas would be sadistically entertaining. (Kind of like a U.S. Open at Winged Foot when they let the rough grow.) It also would expedite expansion to 16.
Scheduling luck of the draw is not new in college football. But it’s become more of a feature than a bug in today’s bloated leagues.
The SEC and ACC are taking overdue steps by adding a ninth league game in 2026. That doesn’t cure imbalanced schedules, though. Would a return to divisional play help? Maybe, even though history is full of lopsided divisions in every power league. At least then there would be clear and coherent pathways to a conference championship game, as opposed to applying the fifth tiebreaker on a list.
The elimination of conference championship games has been discussed but repeatedly dismissed for one obvious reason—those games are cash cows. Beyond revenue, the only playoff purpose they serve is to designate automatic bids—but with straight seeding now in effect, non-champions are eligible for first-round byes, too.
Conference championship weekend has been eyed as a potential start date in an expanded playoff. That’s a reasonable trade-off, if expansion is inevitable. (It is.) But the end date must be adjusted as well—a championship game in late January drags everything out too long.
In this forced march toward 16 or more playoff teams, keep in mind that it is justified as a byproduct of swollen conferences. And keep in mind who created the swelling, and why. USC linking arms with Rutgers was only considered a good idea by Fox executives and Big Ten bean counters. Kneecapping the Big 12 by taking Texas and Oklahoma was excused as necessary predation by the SEC and ESPN.
Those things didn’t make college football better. They’ve just made it more complicated. And one of the casualties of that complication was a perfectly good 12-team playoff that has never gotten a chance to be what it was supposed to be.
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