We still haven’t gotten through the first postseason with a 12-team College Football Playoff, but I’ve seen enough to declare it a resounding success – with asterisks.
The expanded bracket kept so many more teams and fan bases engaged in the regular season than ever before, with dozens of meaningful games in the month of November. It also gave teams like Boise State a path to access the Playoff. Hope is incredibly important in sports, and the expanded CFP gave more teams more of it.
Still, the system isn’t perfect. To be fair, I never expected it would be in Year 1. It’s almost like a beta version of the expanded Playoff we’ll see in 2026, when the new CFP contract officially begins. There’s a lot that could change between now and then, and a lot of that will depend on what Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey want. They’ll largely get to dictate the future of the Playoff themselves, with input from their peers in other conferences.
But before we get to 2026, there’s one glaring issue with the current format that needs to be fixed now. We can’t go another season with an unbalanced bracket that gives the No. 1 overall seed an unnecessarily challenging track to a national championship. The whole point of using a bracket is to ensure that the top-seeded team has the easiest path; that’s what incentivizes excellence. But usually, sports brackets are set up with the teams seeded in the order they are ranked.
This tournament is not set up that way. The top four seeds (Oregon, Georgia, Boise State and Arizona State) are not the four highest-ranked teams. The Broncos were ranked ninth in the selection committee’s final rankings. The Sun Devils were ranked 12th. But because the CFP requires that conference champions be assigned to the top four seed lines — to incentivize participation in league title games by rewarding those four teams with first-round byes — the actual third- and fourth-best teams are under-seeded. And so on down the list.
Ohio State is the sixth-best team in the country, according to this committee. Tennessee is seventh best. That means both teams are two full seed lines lower than they should be. Which isn’t fair to the team that draws the winner of that game in the quarterfinal round.
Oregon went 13-0 and won the Big Ten Championship Game. Its reward? A treacherous path that could include Ohio State in the quarterfinals, Texas in the semifinals and Georgia in the championship game. While the Ducks are still the odds-on favorite to win it all, those three teams have the next-best odds.
Of course, any team that wins a national championship in the new format is going to have to earn it. The paths to a title are significantly harder and lengthier than they used to be in either the four-team CFP era or the BCS era. But the No. 1 overall seed isn’t supposed to have the toughest draw. We aren’t supposed to be highlighting how No. 5 seed Texas and No. 6 seed Penn State have the easiest paths to the semifinals … because they would draw seeds Nos. 3 and 4 in the quarters (Boise State and Arizona State), who aren’t actually the third- and fourth-best teams in the field! They’re among the worst in the entire field — at least, that’s what the committee tells us.
Meanwhile, Oregon could face the sixth-ranked Buckeyes, the third-ranked Longhorns and the second-ranked Bulldogs in three consecutive games.
“What an opportunity, right?” Oregon coach Dan Lanning said of the Ducks’ draw. “In our world, we always talk about red light, green light. Focus on the things you can control. That’s what we’re going to focus on, and winning a national championship isn’t supposed to be easy,” explained Lanning. “You can ask Coach (Nick) Saban. If our path’s a little bit tougher, kudos to us if we go through it and take care of business.”
That’s a great way to look at a crummy situation, and I’m sure Lanning actually relishes the challenge. But it’s not fair to him or his players. It’s not right that the loser of the Big Ten Championship Game has a more enviable path through the Playoff than the winner. In what world does that make any sense?
The good news? This is a problem with some easy solutions. The CFP could eliminate its requirement that you must be a conference champion to earn one of the top four seeds. The five highest-ranked conference champions would still receive automatic spots in the bracket (as they do now), but they have no assigned seeds. So, the committee would then simply rank the 12 teams 1-to-12. Sure, the Big Ten and SEC will likely fill up the top four seed lines most years, and it might seem unfair that their leagues benefit from the most first-round byes. But it’s far fairer to the top-ranked teams to have seeds that match rankings. It would also simplify the format for fans; there was nothing more confusing this fall than seeing two different numbers next to a team’s name during Tuesday night rankings shows on ESPN.
Another solution to this problem would be re-seeding the bracket after the first round. That would ensure that the No. 1 overall seed drew the weakest possible opponent in the quarterfinals as a reward for its regular-season accomplishments. That would work, too, although it would present logistical challenges for both schools and fan bases if they don’t know their opponents and/or game locations until closer to kickoff.
A third possible way to fix the seeding issue is one that could be implemented if the sport’s powerbrokers opt to change the format entirely — and that’s something that is very much on the table moving forward. If the bracket were to expand from 12 to 14 teams, then just two teams would receive first-round byes. That would alleviate the stress (and re-shuffling) currently in play with the third, fourth and fifth league champions. If the top two seeds almost always went to the champions of the Big Ten and SEC, that would likely match the actual rankings themselves, so the committee wouldn’t need to manipulate other seeds as they do now.
The commissioners who oversee the CFP are expected to meet this offseason, as they always do, to evaluate the state of the Playoff. Multiple sources told NBC Sports that they expect the first-round byes being tied to conference championships to be re-examined.
I hope they make it a priority. There’s too much good in the new system to let this one flaw overshadow the rest.
