Need a College Football Playoff expansion plan that makes sense? Look to the FCS format

New York Times

16 hours ago

In case you haven't heard, the latest crackpot College Football Playoff expansion idea was presented to Big Ten athletic directors recently.
It goes something like this (you're forgiven if you lose track): Either 24 or 28 teams, with the Big Ten and SEC receiving six or seven automatic bids, the Big 12 and ACC receiving two fewer and four slots designated for non-automatic qualifiers.
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Come again?
In recent months, CFP expansion has flooded the discourse, with the SEC and Big Ten's standoff over whether there should be a 16-team bracket with five conference champions and 11 at-larges or Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti's plan, which includes four autobids each for his league and the SEC, two each for the Big 12 and ACC, and one for the Group of 5.
This is all nonsense. Codifying favored status for a conference into a postseason format is now a four-decade college football tradition, dating back to the Bowl Alliance and Bowl Championship Series days, but that doesn't make it right. Let's course correct, starting with the next iteration of the CFP.
There's one Playoff format that has proven to work and would appease almost everyone in the sport.
It can be found in the FCS ranks. And it's pretty simple. Twenty-four teams qualify. Ten of them are conference champions. The rest are at-large entrants selected by a committee. The top eight seeds receive a first-round bye, the other 16 play each other, and off we go. Sounds a lot simpler than 4-4-2-2-1-3 or 7-7-5-5-4 or whatever the heck else is floating around.
Before you poo-poo the idea and decry an even bigger role for the selection committee, consider the upside. This format provides a path to the Playoff for virtually every team in the FBS. Win your league, and you're in.
It's right. It's fair. And it would work.
Also, it allows the two wealthiest conferences — the Big Ten and SEC — more teams into the field, via at-large selection. Upset that 9-3 Alabama didn't make it last year? South Carolina, Ole Miss, Missouri and Illinois — also all 9-3 last year — would have made it in such a format.
So would Miami from the ACC and BYU from the Big 12, a team that somehow wasn't even in the conversation despite an impressive 10-2 campaign and a road win over a team that made the Playoff last year, SMU. At the end of the day, chances are the SEC and Big Ten would gobble up a large chunk of those 14 at-larges, and the Big 12 and ACC would get a few extras, too. Everybody wins.
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But the FCS format would also create opportunities for schools in other conferences as well. Instead of having 68 teams outside the Power 4 vie for one berth, the American, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac-12 (once it has eight teams again in 2026) and Sun Belt would each get one team in the field. Though having a true Cinderella in the CFP is much less likely to develop than it is in the NCAA basketball tournament or other sports because of football's physical nature and the role depth plays, it's still fairer than what we have now.
The fact that we have allowed college football as a sport to predetermine which conferences get autobids and which don't without any officially stated objective criteria never sat right with me. If you purport to all be in the same subdivision — the FBS — then every league's champion deserves respect and a seat at the table.
'People have been grandfathered in over the course of time and some have a seat at the table and some don't and they're deemed Autonomous Four and everyone else is not, and here's your one seat at the table to get to the CFP,' Boise State athletic director Jeramiah Dickey told The Athletic in May. 'That just doesn't feel right.'
A system like this works in other sports as well, most notably in basketball every March. It works in the NFL — division champions get an auto bid, then wild-card teams get the rest of the berths (via records, not a committee, of course).
The biggest sport that has a system similar to what the Big Ten is proposing is European soccer, via the Champions League. Some leagues, like the Premier League, get more bids to the tournament each year than others. It's wildly popular — I'm a fan and I watch it annually — and some may argue that something akin to the Big Ten's proposals makes sense because college football operates more like European soccer than it does the NFL. They have a point, but I still say, why not create a system that gives both equal access to each conference and still allows the 'big dogs' the added opportunities they desire?
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A 24-team field, using the FCS format, would have looked like this last year, using the final CFP rankings and a straight seeding format. For the unranked G5 champs, I used Chris Vannini's final 134 to order them.
Byes:
Remaining seeds:
Now, I know what you might be thinking. The Big Ten isn't doing this for fairness — it's doing it for money.
It's true. The idea of installing multiple automatic bids for conferences is a money play. I don't see hordes of fans calling for conferences to get multiple bids. Only conference commissioners — or their coaches, who follow their lead — are advocating for a bigger piece of the financial pie, which, by the way, the Big Ten and SEC already get. When is enough enough?
An expanded Playoff is going to mean more money, no matter what format it is, autobids or not.
That's not to say the FCS format is necessarily the best solution available. There are other alternatives, like keeping the 12-team format (nothing wrong with that! We're only one year in!) or eliminating autobids, taking the top 12/16/24 teams regardless of conference affiliation. But that increases subjectivity even more.
And if you're concerned about going to 24 teams creating a precedent that we're always going to look to expand further, I'm sorry to inform you: We got on that path as soon as we established a Playoff. There will always be advocacy for expansion as long as expanding the postseason equates to more dollars. Even the FCS format has undergone expansion multiple times, from four in 1978 (sound familiar?) to eight in 1981, 12 in 1982, 16 in 1986, 20 in 2010 and the current 24-team format in 2013.
If we're going to change the College Football Playoff format, let's do it in a way that doesn't perpetuate an inherently unfair postseason system through multiple conference autobids. Let's use something that has proven to work.
It's right there if the power brokers are willing to just open their eyes and ears and, for once, consider the greater good of the sport.
(Photo of Cam Miller: George Walker / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
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