For college football, nothing succeeds like excess

A 24-team playoff is barreling toward us, for no reason other than the obvious one.

Big 10 commissioner Tony Petitti

In a four-year span, the College Football Playoff may grow from four teams to 24 teams. That’s Ozempic in reverse, with distasteful side effects.

The 24th-ranked team in last year’s final regular-season CFP poll was James Madison, which got into the 12-team playoff because it was the highest-rated champion of the Group of Five, or second-tier conferences. But the 23rd-ranked team was Iowa, which had an 8-4 record. The point of a playoff is to identify a national champion. The point of a regular season is to identify who has little chance to become one, like Iowa, well-respected as it is.

Still, three of the four major conferences are now supporting a 24-team field, probably by the 2028 season. The only holdout is the Southeastern Conference, which sees no problem with the status quo, particularly because it wants to hang onto its conference championship game, which is far more lucrative than the others. The Big Ten is leading the charge here, and the ACC and the Big 12 are following. The golden goose has been grounded, due to excess baggage.

With the conference champ games taken off the board, the whole thing will take four weeks. Eight teams will receive byes. Teams 9 through 24 will pair up for eight first-round games. Those eight winners will meet the bye teams, and on and on. There will be room, again, for only one Group of Five champion. The rest will probably consist of contenders and pretenders from the four big leagues, plus Notre Dame, which is still fuming over its snub from last year and is threatening to schedule the Savannah Bananas out of spite.

That is a lot of football, not all of it particularly good. Taking last year’s standings, BYU-Houston would be one first-round game. Fire up the grill. In past years we would be concerned about so much football causing injuries and playing havoc with academics, since final exams are usually in December. How quaint. That’s like worrying about killer bees and the millenium bug. Money has always been prominent in all college sports, of course. But life looks very different when money goes from a big thing to the only thing.

Tony Petitte is the Big Ten commissioner and the main cheerleader for a 24-team payoff, er, playoff. He was once in charge of CBS Sports, then ran the MLB Network. He remembers when baseball expanded its playoffs, and says that he didn’t recall any resistance, that all the teams and fan bases wanted three wild-cards per league. He said that it didn’t disturb the sanctity of the regular season. It did, of course, because it robbed us all of legitimate pennant races and the daily suspense therein.

But baseball’s regular season is a 162-game march in which rivalries and results become a blur. College football’s regular season Saturdays are a ritual, a social event, a weekend that is planned well in advance. In the days of wire-service polls, BCS championship games and a 4-team CFP, every game was a potential trap door, every weekend a Survivor episode. What happens to the Texas-Texas A&M game when both teams have already pocketed playoff spots? Ask the ACC what happened to its once sold-out basketball tournament when the league expanded and more than a half-dozen schools got tournament bids. It became a pageant, not a milestone.

There were 11 CFP games last year, the second year of the 12-team bracket. Five of those games were decided by 17 or more points, although you can blame Indiana for two of those. There were also 11 CFP games in the 2004 tournament. Four of them featured 17-point margins or more.

Coaches want the 24-team format, except for the ones who really think about it, and realize that a bigger playoff means more firings of those who don’t make it. Fans want the 24-team format, but only those with private jets. Last year, Miami fans were asked to travel to College Station, Arlington and Glendale, Az. before the Hurricanes played the final at home (and lost to Indiana). Oregon and Texas Tech played in Miami, and then Oregon went to Atlanta and would have had to return to Miami had it won.

Next year Georgia warms up its regular season with Western Kentucky and Arkansas State and finishes with Georgia Tech. If it were to play that schedule in 2028, and go 5-4 in its SEC games, which would be a massive underachievement in most seasons, that would create an 8-4 record and a probable spot in the 24-team field.

USC, which is celebrating another top-flight recruiting season as it annually does, leads off with San Jose State, Fresno State and Louisiana. Its Big 10 schedule involves Indiana, Ohio State, Penn State, Washington and Oregon, and there’s always a game the Trojans seem to botch along the way, but you figure that’s an 8-4 season before the first practice.

Yet players must be paid, and more coaching “analysts” must be hired, and more replicas of the White House ballroom must be built on campus to keep the industry thriving. Those of us who loudly demanded that the players get their money can’t complain too much, at least not until we get through 24 for a couple of years, and decide what we really need is 32.