College football is about to give us one of those gloriously chaotic November weekends that remind us why we are fans of this lawless sport in the first place. Ranked teams will collide, championship contenders will stumble, and the SEC could finish Week 10 with a six-way logjam at the top of the conference.
And when the smoke clears, the people who believe college football needs a 24-team playoff will be pointing at the carnage as proof that they've been right all along. The problem is, they'll have it exactly backward.
This is the kind of weekend that should make us question why college football keeps expanding its postseason, not rejoice at the possibility of squeezing even more teams into it. The beauty of November has always been that the stakes grow higher as the number of legitimate championship contenders gets smaller. Instead, college football's inner circle seems determined to make sure everyone has a chance, regardless of how many opportunities they've already squandered.
We've somehow convinced ourselves that more teams mean a better postseason, and that every program with a halfway respectable resumé deserves an invitation to compete for a national championship.
Rubbish.
At some point, we might want to remember that the regular season is supposed to mean something, too. It's been called the greatest regular season in sports, but it's slowly deteriorating into the most trivial.
November used to be college football's first round of the playoffs
There was a time when college football didn't need a selection committee, a television reveal show, or a group of conference commissioners arguing over percentages and revenue shares to make November interesting for fans. The games took care of themselves.
A top-five matchup in November wasn't just an opportunity to improve playoff seeding. It was potentially the end of someone's national championship dreams. A shocking upset could change the entire landscape of the sport, and one poorly timed loss could undo two months of hard work. The finality of a November loss could be soul-snatching in its gravity.
Was that system always fair? Of course not. College football has never been particularly good at fair — or at determining its national champion without controversy (just ask any college football fan who the1990 national champion is). Pretending the old systems were perfect would be ridiculous.
But some of them certainly were compelling.
Every Saturday carried consequences that reached far beyond conference standings, and the possibility of watching a national championship contender have its season ruined by an unranked opponent was part of what made things so wonderfully unpredictable.
Want to see a Florida State fan cringe in November? Just say the words "Wide Right" and watch the twitching begin. Months of hopes and dreams crushed at the whim of the kicking gods — more than once.
Now we're moving toward a world in which a Top-10 team can lose multiple games, fail to reach its conference championship, and still have a perfectly reasonable argument for inclusion in a 24-team playoff. It's as if surviving the regular season has become just as important as excelling during it.
A 24-team playoff doesn't solve the problem, it just lowers the standard
Look at what's potentially unfolding in the SEC this weekend: If Georgia loses to Ole Miss and Kentucky falls to Tennessee, the conference could find itself with six teams sitting on two SEC losses, creating an absolute mess of a championship race as the calendar heads deeper into November.
Throw in the other ranked matchups around the country, and we're looking at exactly the kind of weekend that should have enormous implications for the national championship picture.
Instead, the expansion crowd will undoubtedly argue that this is precisely why college football needs more playoff spots. With so many good teams beating each other, how could anyone possibly expect a committee to determine which 12 teams deserve a chance in December?
Here's a thought: Maybe we should expect the teams to figure that out on the field before December. The SEC's potential bottleneck doesn't show evidence that the postseason needs to cater to more teams. It shows that the regular season is doing exactly what it's supposed to do, separating contenders through a series of increasingly difficult challenges.
If Georgia loses to Ole Miss, that loss should carry real consequences. If Tennessee beats Kentucky, the Volunteers should benefit from that win at the expense of another contender. And if multiple SEC programs finish the season with two or three losses, perhaps some of them simply haven't earned the right to compete for a national championship.
That shouldn't be a controversial or provocative statement, but apparently it is.
There's a difference between being one of the 24 best teams in college football and being a team that actually deserves an opportunity to win the national championship. Expanding the playoff keeps blurring that distinction until we're left pretending that a team finishing third or fourth in its own conference somehow has an equally compelling claim to being the best team in America.
The argument isn't that those teams couldn't win a playoff game or even make a championship run. Of course they could. That's what makes single-elimination tournaments so riveting. But being good enough to win a tournament and doing enough to simply earn a spot in it are two entirely different things.
The SEC's impending chaos is a feature, not a flaw
One of the most frustrating parts of the expansion debate is the assumption that competitive chaos is a problem college football needs to fix. Why?
The possibility of six SEC teams being tangled together in the standings is fascinating. It gives every remaining conference game even more significance and creates the kind of scoreboard-watching frenzy that makes November one of the best months on the sports calendar.
Georgia fans should care a lot about what happens against Ole Miss. Tennessee fans should understand exactly what's at stake against Kentucky. Every team in the conference championship race should feel the pressure of knowing that another loss could change everything.
That's not a broken system. That's compelling competition. That's heart-up-in-your-throat, wide-eyed, heartbreaking, exuberating television for fans.
And yes, there's a very good chance that much of this mess will sort itself out before December. Teams will win, teams will lose, and the conference standings will eventually give us a clearer picture of who deserves to play for a conference championship.
That's precisely the point.
We should allow the regular season to eliminate teams from national championship contention rather than continually expand the postseason to rescue them from the consequences of their losses.
The problem isn't that the SEC could have six two-loss teams fighting for the conference championship. That's the kind of chaos that makes college football great. The problem is that a 24-team playoff would give nearly all of them a comfortable path to the postseason. Suddenly, those November losses that once threatened to end championship dreams become little more than inconveniences along the way.
The difference between winning and losing a November showdown boils down to hosting a playoff game instead of potentially missing the postseason altogether, and that means something important has been lost.
Seeding matters. Home-field advantage matters. Nobody is suggesting otherwise. But neither of those concerns carries the same weight as knowing your season might effectively be over when the clock hits zero.
College football keeps trying to fix what made it special
The NFL can afford to have a large playoff field because professional football operates under a different structure. Its teams play in a league built around competitive balance, standardized schedules, and a postseason that was designed to give both division champions and wild-card contenders a chance.
But college football has never been that sport. With more than 130 FBS programs, wildly different schedules, massive disparities in resources, and conferences rooted in tribal loyalty, college football has always depended on exclusivity to make its national championship meaningful.
That exclusivity admittedly had its flaws. Plenty of deserving teams were left out of championship conversations over the years, and expanding beyond the old four-team format was a reasonable response to some of those problems.
But there's a difference between correcting an imperfect system and swinging so far in the opposite direction that the original purpose gets lost.
The four-team playoff was too restrictive for many coaches, administrators, and even fans. The 12-team format gives a broader path while still requiring impressive regular-season results. Now, apparently, even that isn't enough.
And if 24 teams still leaves somebody unhappy, what happens next? Do we expand to 32? Do we eventually decide that every Power Four team with a winning record deserves a participation trophy and a postseason invitation? If six wins gets you bowl-eligible, will seven wins guarantee a playoff berth?
We are reaching the point where pursuing inclusion starts coming at the expense of achievement. College football doesn't need to make everyone happy. It needs to make winning matter. College football's greatest postseason tradition was never about how many teams got invited to the party. It was about how difficult it was to earn an invitation in the first place.
This weekend should remind us of that. The SEC could descend into absolute chaos, the Big Ten could eat itself, national championship contenders could see their hopes take a big blow, and fans across the country will spend Saturday glued to their televisions because the results could have enormous implications.
The people pushing for a 24-team playoff will see all of that and insist it proves the postseason needs to get bigger. I'll be watching the same games and wondering why we're so determined to make the outcomes of those games matter less.
Add us as a preferred source on Google