College Football Playoff Bracket (Graphic by the College Football Playoff)
The College Football Playoffs bracket has been disputed over the last few years. The committee decided that a move to 12 teams was the way. This is because we would see more rotation of teams, more views, and more attendance. The thing about that is we saw teams once again left out. Below would be a twist and a longer season. This would show lower rates of opt-outs and fewer transfers before bowl season begins.
Evolution from the 4-team to the 12-team
4 Team Playoffs
The College Football Playoffs started in the 2014-2015 season and ended in Arlington, Texas with Ohio State as champions. For the next 10 years teams competed based on the top 4 seeds and the top 12 got New Year Six bowl games. This was some of the most controversial years of the playoff for college football. Many fans over the years stopped watching and didn’t attend the game. From a team standpoint, we saw players opt and the transfer portal became a big issue. There were talks amongst the committee about how they should fix it and for years they just left at four teams until people wanted to see more excitement and more teams who were eligible every year.
12 Team Playoffs
The 12-team bracket made its debut in the 2024-2025 season and once again Ohio State came out on top with the national championship. Along with this came a guaranteed bid for the Power 4 conference champions, the top 4 or even the 5th seed. They also got a bye week as part of their win. This bracket brought life back to the playoffs and also had more fan bases tuning in because of it.
The struggle for some bases around the world was that certain conferences got more teams than others. The Big 12 was the biggest ones left out this year as they had a four-way tie to cap off the season. They should have seen at least two teams and not just the one that lost in the second round. The next problem that many voiced was the bye week for the top 4 teams when they had already sat since the first week in December. No team should sit three weeks before playing their next game during the season. Those four teams granted the bye week didn’t make it past that week of the playoffs and so sitting that long proved that point.
There are many ways to fix this bracket to make it more fair and also avoid sitting for three weeks but that means the committee has to acknowledge that there are problems.
The Bracket with a twist
This new bracket would turn college football back to the old ways of post-season. This would give teams hope for playing in the postseason again. The teams would need six wins to qualify just like a bowl game and then they would be put into bowl games. From there the next rounds would consist of ranking the top 42 from the original 84 teams. The seeding would occur based on record, strength of schedule, and conference champions. No one is guaranteed a certain seed or even a bye week because there wouldn’t be any. From there they battle it out until a champion is crowned. This would start the week after the conference championship and run until the third week of January each year.
