The New College Football Playoff
By: Noah Massey | Feb 3, 2025
Over the last decade college football has cosplayed as an amateur establishment while increasingly embodying more and more characteristics of a professional league, changes which have drastically changed the functionality of the sport.
While it was technically still an amateur division, the money pouring into college athletics has become undeniable and has only continued to increase in recent years, with enough of an impact that a bad TV deal essentially ended the 66-year-old Pac-12 conference down with a mass exodus of ten member schools.
With the focus of college football shifting towards money-driven professionalism, the league has incorporated many ideas from its senior league, with players moving from amateur students to roles more akin to professional free agents. Innovations such as the transfer portal and NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) deals – as well as the incorporation of revenue sharing this summer – have allowed former “amateur” college players to profit tremendously from their sport.
With the shift towards an NFL-like system, collegiate athletics has also modernized their postseason structure. In 2014, the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) was replaced by the initial four-team College Football Playoff, doubling the number of teams eligible for the national championship. Beyond money, another cause of this shift was bias, as the BCS selection system utilized polls and a computerized system to determine the No.1 and No.2 ranked teams, leading to controversial omissions and concerns for inaccuracy.
By shifting to the CFP, the goal was to help cool the concerns for controversy, creating a committee of former players, coaches, and athletic directors to select a larger number of teams based on a set of standardized criteria. While not perfect, it was a major step forward in standardizing a previously arbitrary selection process and adapting it for the future of the sport.
On a competitive level, the CFP also had other ramifications, with other bowl games losing luster compared to the three games that made up the CFP. In the first rendition of the playoff in 2014, the Sugar and Rose Bowls smashed their numbers from the previous season by over 10 million viewers, even though one game was a 39-point blowout. Between the three games, all three surpassed the viewership for the 2013 national championship, though the Orange and Fiesta bowls fell short of their viewership numbers as those games simply mattered less.
With more interest and revenue being created from the new CFP games, a question emerged – why not more? With highly competitive schools still being left out and a playoff model considerably smaller than the NFL, why not expand further? With the possibility of more games, more revenue, and more involved fans, it was simply a matter of time.
This year, the first rendition of the 12-team playoff ensued. With the first round taking place on the campuses of the higher-seeded teams, the remaining rounds utilized the former New Year’s Six bowl games. Under the old four-team format, the Sugar, Rose, Fiesta, Cotton, Orange, and Cotton Bowls would rotate between hosting the two semifinal games and hosting the four most prestigious standalone games, featuring eight of the top teams that were left out of the playoff. Due to frequent opt-outs and fanbases often frustrated by their proximity to the playoff, these games frequently struggled with viewership during the four-team era, with the final Cotton Bowl between USC and Tulane attracting only 4.2 million viewers, less than a fifth of that year’s National Championship.
These bowl games stood as relics of the BCS system, where the prestige of winning them was far higher as prestigious yearly showdowns that served as something more akin to the National Championship due to it only allowing two teams, especially for famed contests such as the Rose Bowl with its iconic venue. In the 12-team playoff era, they serve as stepping stones for the championship game after serving as either stepping stones or consolation contests in the four-team era.
For the 12 bids, the NCAA decided to rework the system to preserve the importance of conference championship games and ensure the inclusion of different conferences. Four first-round byes went to the four highest-ranked conference champions while the fifth conference champion and seven at-large bids made up the remainder of the field.
While this expansion was celebrated by many, others were more skeptical, saying that the playoff would devalue the regular season. However, this argument was largely disproven, with many teams that would have been considered “out” in the prior system fighting for a spot late in the season, considerably increasing the importance of games that would have otherwise had little meaning.
One game that represented this change was the Week 13 showdown between BYU and Arizona State, where both teams had lost and would have already been out of playoff contention in the previous system. However, Arizona State’s victory in the matchup helped propel it to its conference championship, where victory secured the school’s first-ever berth to the College Football Playoff. While the Sun Devils fell short in their first contest, their magical run after beginning the year 5-2 was one of many surprising stories last season that would have been overlooked in the old system. This season, six teams made the CFP for the first time, allowing six new fanbases to experience the magic of the postseason for the first time and helping promote those schools on a national stage.
Yet the tournament wasn’t without its fair share of criticism and concerns. From a business perspective, the neutral-site locations of the final three rounds exacted a tremendous toll on fans, between travel and ticket costs. Some observed that the Fiesta Bowl, played in Arizona between Penn State and Boise State had at least 10% of its seats empty, though the official attendance insisted upon a capacity crowd. Adding to these concerns, the decreased importance of Conference Championships has become a concern, with both the National Champion and runner-up not partaking in the extra game – Ohio State didn't qualify for the Big Ten championship, and Notre Dame isn't in a conference.
Plenty of concerns emerged regarding the seeding, with many fans believing that No.1 Oregon's more difficult path due to the formatting of seeding was unjust. Beyond this, selection controversy remained when two three-loss teams – Alabama and Mississippi – were passed on for a two-loss SMU team for the final at-large bid. The controversy primarily arose because Alabama and Mississippi played in the arguably more difficult SEC conference.
Even with playoff expansion, the continuation of selection controversy has indicated that conflict is inevitable regardless of the format. Due to a lack of games and a lack of conference overlap, comparing teams is an arbitrary process that will always elicit debate, though the current structure ensures that every one-loss team from a power conference will qualify, implying that every team left out had mishaps. By ensuring inclusion, the CFP has taken a major step forward from the four-team system, which left out a 13-0 Florida State squad in its final rendition.
While the future of the playoff seems to have reached a new point of stability, the format will likely continue to shift in upcoming years. With millions paid out to each team for qualifying for the CFP and for advancing in it, the desire for each conference to include as many of its teams as possible has become paramount beyond simply prestige, with the two biggest conferences – the SEC and Big Ten – wanting to create as many automatic qualifiers from their conferences as possible. While no other conference would attempt to reduce their odds at the playoff, Yahoo! Sports’ Ross Dellinger reported, “the Big Ten and SEC believe they have authority over any change to the playoff format starting with the 2026 postseason”.
With plenty of uncertainty on the horizon, one thing can be said for sure – college football is a business at this point, driven by revenue and self-interest. Very little represents this more than the College Football Playoff, where underwhelming viewership numbers this playoff (often falling short of their predecessors due in part to the awkward dates and times that they took place on to avoid conflicting with NFL games) won’t dissuade future further expansion of the playoff to 14 or 16 teams.
As athletic departments run themselves further and further into debt – the UCLA athletic department ran at a 36.6 million deficit for the 2023-24 fiscal year while Ohio State, who just won the CFP, ran a 38 million deficit – schools will continue to utilize football to make money while further limiting expenditures in Olympic sports. College Football – as well as the newfound possibilities for many nontraditional schools to make the playoffs – can serve as a tremendous opportunity for schools to promote their schools and create excitement for the realistic possibility of competing for a National Championship. This exact phenomenon occurred for Indiana, whose CFP excitement fueled attendance enough to break their single-season record by 32,000, including four straight sellouts to end the season.
Professionalization of college football will continue to grow, as the NCAA and its conferences continue to navigate the unprecedented waters of creating a league of student-athletes battling for eligibility, playing time, and compensation. Whether it is the new CFP, revenue-sharing, extra eligibility, or new conferences, the current landscape of the sport will continue to evolve and one can only hope that the essence of the sport remains throughout the changes. Without its amateurish essence rooted in history, tradition, and passion, college football has to avoid losing its unique charm amid the countless other leagues vying for attention across the globe.
