How should the College Football Playoff work? Debating seeding, selection and more changes

This year’s Ohio State-Notre Dame national championship felt like a really big deal in Atlanta. A mural of the trophy adorned the high-rise Signia Hotel adjacent to Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Buckeyes and Fighting Irish fans were everywhere. At long last, it felt like the College Football Playoff achieved its goal of turning the title game into a Final Four-like event.

Then we found out it drew the third-lowest television audience for a title game since the CFP began in 2014.

The first 12-team Playoff had a lot of great moments. It could also use some tweaks. In the short term, leaders are unlikely to make major changes to the format for the 2025 season. The bigger stuff is more likely to come in 2026, when the new contracts kick in and the SEC and Big Ten basically get to do whatever they want.

But now that we’ve experienced the positives and negatives of the expanded tournament’s first year, we can ask a bolder question: How should the Playoff look? Stewart has provided his ideal format, from the size of the field to when the games should be played. He’s an optimist. An idealist, even.

Ralph, more of a pragmatist, is here to add a dose of reality.

Number of teams

Mandel: I really like 12. It gives everyone something to play for: four byes, four home games, four “just get in.” I always knew some teams with underwhelming resumes would get those last at-large spots. No one was harmed by Indiana or SMU getting in the Playoff this year. But you go any further than that, and it gets dicey. That Alabama lost three times, one a blowout in the second-to-last week of the regular season, and still very nearly made it — while finishing No. 11 in the committee’s rankings — is not the best case for expanding the field further.

Russo: Stewart is correct that the field doesn’t need more teams, but even before the first 12-teamer was played, there was a push for expansion to 14 last spring, led by the Big Ten. So yeah, it’s expanding. Probably not in 2025, but perhaps to 14 or maybe 16 for 2026. I can already hear the sighs.

Understanding that it will expand, please, let’s keep it at 14. Sixteen would eliminate byes, one of those “things to play for” that helps the system, and would create No. 1 vs. No. 16 and No. 2 vs. No. 15 games that are not likely to be competitive.

Seeding

Mandel: The seeding was a mess this year. The approach to reward the top four conference champions with byes was well-intentioned in 2021, but it was agreed upon before realignment and consolidation killed one major conference and super-sized the others. The problem is not so much that the teams ranked No. 9 (Boise State) and No. 12 (Arizona State) got byes, it’s that the No. 4 team (Penn State) got a lower-ranked quarterfinal opponent (No. 9 Boise State) than the No. 1 team (Oregon vs. No. 6 Ohio State).

That’s not competitively equitable. Arizona State was rewarded by getting into the Playoff, which it wouldn’t have if it had lost in its conference championship game. Stop there. Give the top four teams the top four seeds.

Russo: This is the most likely component to be immediately addressed for the 2025 season, but there’s no guarantee that a change will be made. The 2025 season will be the final year of the CFP’s original contract, which requires unanimity among the 10 Football Bowl Subdivision conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director to make alterations to the format. The leaders of Big 12, ACC and Mountain West are in no rush to toss out a piece of the format that just benefited their teams.

As ACC commissioner Jim Phillips pointed out to The Athletic, professional leagues — including the NFL — have playoff formats that give preferential treatment to division winners regardless of their overall record.

The question is whether it’s worth it for Phillips and those who might want to keep this seeding structure to stand in the way of short-term change when it’s all going to be revamped in the long run, whether they want it or not.

The guess here is the seeding gets tweaked for 2025, the way Stewart suggests.

Automatic qualifiers/conference champs

Mandel: No need to tinker here.

Russo: There will almost assuredly be tinkering here.

Expanding the field to 14 or 16 opens the door for the Big Ten and SEC to receive as many as four automatic qualifiers, with the Big 12 and ACC each getting multiple guaranteed spots, too. This idea was floated last spring, and as unappealing as it sounded, being assured two spots might sound pretty good now to the Big 12 and ACC after the Big 12 got only one team in the field of 12 and the ACC was also looking at being a one-bid conference until Clemson played its way in by winning the league title game. Expanding automatic qualifiers might be especially intriguing if the leagues get creative with how those spots are filled. We’ll come back to that.

Sites

Mandel: I love bowls. I love covering bowls. But I get to go to the bowls for free. I don’t have to pay thousands of dollars to attend them like most fans do.

Meanwhile, the first-round sites were a smashing success based on accounts of those who attended them. The games were sold out, and the toilets did not freeze!

Let the bowls host the semifinals and the national championship game. The quarterfinals belong on campuses, too, so the fans of those top-four seeds can see their teams play without getting on a plane.

Russo: I love Cracker Barrel. I love eating at Cracker Barrel. There is no more reliable dining experience. I know exactly what I’m getting no matter where in America I step into a Cracker Barrel, from the rocking chairs outside to the tchotchkes in the store to the refills of sweet tea to the taste of the chicken-fried steak. It delivers every time, stress-free.

This is the CFP’s relationship with the bowls. They deliver every time, stress-free, in hosting big games. Home sites are a wild card. There is no real desire among the decision makers to put more games on campus. Sorry.

Schedule

Mandel: I know people will tell me not to overreact to one year of data, but the fact Ohio State-Notre Dame got the third-lowest TV audience (22.1 million) for a CFP national title game should be very concerning to organizers. How could a game between those two enormous brands lead to a viewership drop from Michigan-Washington (no offense, Washington) the year before?

I think we know why. The thing stretched two weeks too long. Interest plateaued with the New Year’s quarterfinals, as the ratings for the Jan. 9-10 semifinals were down considerably from last year’s Jan. 1 edition, and then a down-to-the-wire title game between two iconic brands with a month of games leading into it barely did better than this year’s Jan. 1 Rose Bowl quarterfinal (21.1 million) between Ohio State and Oregon.

I’ve said it for three years: Shift the season a week earlier. Week 0 becomes Week 1. Then you can hold the first round on the weekend that is currently Army-Navy, the quarterfinals the third week of December and the semis where they belong, on New Year’s Day. Most importantly, the CFP is over before the NFL playoffs begin.

Russo: Again, Stewart is correct here, but as of right now, there doesn’t appear to be much desire to make the fix he is suggesting.

The problem: Thanksgiving weekend, aka Rivalry Week around college football. The television networks have a captive audience for a four-day weekend. Moving that up a week and replacing it with 10 conference championship games spread out over Black Friday and Saturday is not particularly appealing compared to a full slate stuffed with high-stakes games and rivalries.

However, there is an idea that’s been floating around college football circles for a few months that could maybe increase the possibility of shifting forward the entire season. Fox’s Joel Klatt talked about this on a recent episode of On3’s “Andy & Ari Show,” and Phillips referred to it after a CFP management committee meeting the Sunday before the championship game:

What if conference championship weekend featured more games?

For example, the Big Ten pits its No. 1 and 2 teams against each other for the conference title and a first-round bye. No. 3 plays No. 6 for one automatic bid. No. 4 plays No. 5 for the other. That’s potentially six games combined for the SEC and Big Ten.

In Atlanta, Phillips talked about holding a 2 vs. 3 game for an automatic bid, while the team that finishes first in the conference standings getting the other without playing another game.

But let’s take it a step farther: What if No. 1 played No. 4? Unfair, you say? Maybe, but the fact is, these conferences have grown so large (16-18 teams in each P4) as to render their standings almost useless.

Last season, none of the top three teams in the ACC’s regular-season standings (SMU, Clemson, Miami) played each other. SMU finished first while playing only two of the four teams (Syracuse, Georgia Tech, Louisville, Duke) that tied for fourth. Miami, on the other hand, played all four of those teams, including two on the road.

There were a lot of complaints from outside the Big Ten about Indiana’s schedule last season. But Big Ten rival Illinois should have had the biggest complaint. The Illini finished the regular season 9-3, 5-3 in the Big Ten, after facing Big Ten championship game participants Oregon and Penn State on the road plus four other bowl-bound teams. The Hoosiers played only one of the Big Ten’s big three (Ohio State) and five of the six teams in the league that didn’t reach bowl eligibility. Using the play-in system, Ohio State would have hosted Iowa for a bid, and Indiana would have played Illinois for the other.

This is not an endorsement of an expanded championship weekend. And maybe it will have no bearing on whether the start of the season can be moved up. Allowing the CFP to escape a series of weekend battles with the NFL playoffs might be deemed more valuable to ESPN than a packed Thanksgiving weekend schedule. Of course, Fox — which owns no CFP rights — might think differently.

Selection process

Mandel: No one is ever going to be happy with the committee. But it would help if there was more transparency. The basketball committee makes its core metric, the NET ratings (and the RPI before that), public. You can see exactly what it’s discussing. Meanwhile, football’s strength of schedule metrics are kept behind closed doors.

Also: Strength of schedule should matter. I love Boise State, but it never should have been ranked higher than either the Big 12 or ACC champs. My favorite example of “two losses is better than three” this year was 9-3 Syracuse sitting two spots behind 10-2 UNLV in the penultimate rankings. The Orange beat the Rebels on the road during the season.

Russo: You know what would decrease the subjectivity in the selection process? More automatic qualifiers based on conference standings and play-in games. Just sayin’.

(Top photo: Don Juan Moore / Getty Images)