Why the 24-team College Football Playoff is actually the perfect solution for college football

The expansion of the College Football Playoff to 24 teams is now an inevitability. The Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC are all backing the new format along with independent Notre Dame. The SEC (*cough*ESPN*cough*) is the lone holdout, but even Greg Sankey isn't powerful enough to stop the momentum. A whole lot of college football fans don't want to see it come to this. They're probably not going to get their wish. So why don't we look at the bright side of things?

I get the frustration. I was not in favor of expanding to 12 in the first place. I don't think CFB needs to move to 16 even. And 24 is a whole different animal. My instinct was to oppose this with all my being...until I started thinking about what the 24-team playoff actually looks like. And you know what? I've come around. Because I love college football and I'm not going to let fear dictate my enjoyment of the sport I love.

Walk with me. Carry a bell and yell "shame" if you must. But at least consider the possibility that a 24-team playoff might actually improve college football as it currently exists. Don't believe me? I didn't expect you to at first.

1. 1. More fun matchups
2. 2. More fun matchups at college stadiums
3. 3. Great matchups make up for blowouts
4. 4. 24-team CFP won't, I repeat, won't devalue the regular season
5. 5. Games will still be meaningful
6. 6. No one is going to rest starters for a rivalry game
7. 7. Seeding concerns will keep teams engaged late in the season
8. 8. Believe it or not, there will be more meaningful regular-season games
9. 9. No more conference championship games
10. 10. Every team with an argument will get to prove themselves
11. 11. Selection will be less arbitrary
12. 12. True Cinderella runs are unlocked
13. 13. Every program and player has a realistic chance every year
14. 15. Top 24 feels fitting for college football

1. More fun matchups

Let's just start with something all college football fans should be able to agree on: Watching college football is fun, and an expanded playoff would add more fun games to the slate.

We'll get to meaningful games and the regular season in a bit. Right now, I want to focus on the matchups we will get to watch. The 12-team playoff involves 11 games. And those are plenty fun. A 24-team playoff would involve 23 games.

We already tune in to a whole bunch of bowl games in December with nothing at stake but pride. Expanding the playoff means more opportunities to enjoy watching college football. Hell, let's talk about the matchups we didn't get to enjoy last year.

2. More fun matchups at college stadiums

If the 24-team playoff was in place in 2025, the top eight teams would have gotten a bye while these games would have been played at CFB stadiums:

• James Madison at Alabama
• Iowa at Miami
• Georgia Tech at Notre Dame
• Houston at BYU
• Tulane at Texas
• Virginia at Vanderbilt
• Michigan at Utah
• Arizona at USC

Nevermind the debates over Miami vs. Notre Dame vs. BYU resumes. Those three programs would have been hosting a playoff game. Vanderbilt would host a playoff game. We wouldn't have even realized what a juicy matchup Michigan vs. Utah would turn out to be. And let's throw in a Pac-12 reunion between Arizona and USC for good measure.

Second round games hosted at Indiana, Ohio State, Georgia, Texas Tech, Oregon, Ole Miss, Texas A&M and Oklahoma would have been super fun as well.

3. Great matchups make up for blowouts

Would some of those games be blowouts? Sure. Blowouts happen in college football all the time. And they don't just happen to teams like JMU and Tulane. Indiana blew out Oregon in a matchup no one was complaining about beforehand.

I think fans need to change their thinking around blowouts anyways. We shouldn't be so offended by them. And we shouldn't be so afraid of them that we overlook the fun non-blowouts we might see. After all, I expected Miami to get their socks knocked off by Ohio State last year. Settling things on the field is always the best way to go, even if blowouts are a risk.

I'd even argue there might be fewer blowouts with G5 teams more often paired against flawed P4 teams than certain powerhouses.

Last year's playoff was entertaining as all hell, even with a few blowouts. More games = more entertainment. If you love college football, why wouldn't you want to watch more games with real stakes?

Speaking of stakes...

4. 24-team CFP won't, I repeat, won't devalue the regular season

The most common argument against an expanded playoff is that it would devalue the regular season. The logic is clear: The more teams that get in, the less costly it is to lose during the regular season. The less teams care about losing, the less valuable the regular season will feel. Makes sense, right?

It might make sense, but it's also a fundamental misinterpretation of what meaningful games actually are in college football. It's an obsession with rearview mirror analysis. It disregards a simple fact: If we put stakes in a game in the moment, then the game matters, regardless of how it might be reframed in a month's time.

I didn't watch last year's Notre Dame vs. Miami game with an understanding of how meaningful it would be for the playoff. I watched it because it was a matchup of two good teams playing compelling football.

5. Games will still be meaningful

Opponents of the 24-team field could look at 2025 and argue Texas' season-opening loss to Ohio State would be rendered meaningless by expansion. Would it really, though? Do we really think fans wouldn't still care about who won that game?

Dan Lanning and Oregon made it into the 12-team field even though they lost to Indiana in Week 7. That game felt plenty meaningful in the moment. My friends who are Oregon fans were distraught even though they knew well and good they were still playoff bound. It's only after the fact that we ascribe meaninglessness to a matchup.

We don't actually know which games are meaningful or not once the season is done and buried. By then, 1) Who cares? and 2) Meaning is in the eye of the beholder.

We don't get to go back in time and tell LSU fans they shouldn't have celebrated their season-opening win over then No. 5 Clemson because Clemson would go on to lose five games. We don't have to erase our memories of watching Florida State trounce Alabama just because the former flamed out and the latter dragged themselves back into playoff contention. The same would apply to regular-season games with a 24-team playoff.

6. No one is going to rest starters for a rivalry game

There's catastrophizing going on about the 24-team playoff and a "meaningless regular season." It has people dreaming about rivals Michigan and Ohio State resting starters at the end of the season because of the playoff.

I call BS. The biggest BS. BS the size of Lake Erie.

First of all, you cannot convince me that coaches, players and the people holding the wallets that fund rosters are so lacking in competitive spirit that they'd willingly sit out of a rivalry game with the playoff on the horizon. Michigan and Ohio State care about beating each other far too much to take that game off.

7. Seeding concerns will keep teams engaged late in the season

Secondly, what universe is this where teams can afford to lose their rivalry matchup and not suffer consequences? This isn't the NFL, where you clinch your playoff spot and sit your starters in the final week because the result literally doesn't matter. There is no clinching a CFP seed. Ohio State could have lost to Michigan and still made it into the playoff, easily. But losing to their rival, aside from being unacceptable, would have cost them their first-round bye.

Every loss in college football would still hold weight in a 24-team playoff because the difference in seeding between teams with one, two or three or even four losses would still be significant.

8. Believe it or not, there will be more meaningful regular-season games

Here's something people never consider when thinking about the meaningfulness of the regular season: So many more games will matter with a larger pool of teams trying to get in.

Look at rivalry week alone:

• Texas vs. Texas A&M would have been an elimination game for the Longhorns.
• Georgia Tech vs. Georgia would have been a play-in game for the Yellow Jackets.
• Arizona vs. Arizona State would have been a play-in game for both sides.
• Michigan vs. Ohio State would have meant the difference between the Wolverines hosting and traveling in the first round.
• Pitt vs. Miami would have been an elimination game for Pitt.
• Tennessee vs. Vanderbilt would have been an elimination game for the Volunteers and the difference between hosting or traveling in the first round for the Commodores.
• USC vs. UCLA would have been an elimination game for USC.
• SMU vs. Cal would have been an elimination game for SMU.
• Houston vs. Baylor would have been a play-in game for the Cougars.
• Iowa vs. Nebraska would have been a play-in game for the Hawkeyes.
• Washington vs. Oregon would have been a potential play-in game for the Huskies.

For every team feeling comfortable enough with their seeding to take the final week off, there's another 10 scraping and clawing for a chance to make it into the postseason.

Make no mistake, those games mattered when teams like Arizona, Arizona State, Georgia Tech, Houston, Iowa, Michigan Pitt, SMU, Tennessee, USC and Washington had no hopes of making the playoff. Their meaning would only be heightened after expansion.

And that's just looking at the last regular-season games of the season. There are countless other games earlier in the season that would have had actual stakes that simply weren't there in 2025.

9. No more conference championship games

The actually meaningless games in college football right now are the conference championship games. A 24-team playoff would do away with those, mercifully ending one of the biggest complications of the playoff era.

I wish conference title games still fit into the world of college football because winning your conference should matter. It's just not the reality these days, especially with conferences so bloated that even picking two teams to face off feels unfair.

I'd much rather watch eight first-round blowouts than deal with conference title game machinations ever again.

10. Every team with an argument will get to prove themselves

As much as I enjoy laughing at Notre Dame's petulant response to being left out of the CFP, I do think they got royally screwed and deserved to be there. BYU also had a case. So did Texas, given their strength of schedule.

The beauty of a 24-team field is everyone with even the semblance of a case gets the chance to prove it on the field. Under the BCS or four-team playoff, we wouldn't have discovered just how good Miami was in 2025. We wouldn't have gotten a title run from Ohio State in 2024. How many unexpectedly great teams have we missed out on over the years? We won't have to wonder any more.

11. Selection will be less arbitrary

As it stands, the CFP selection committee has to find nitpicky ways to separate teams with relatively similar résumés. The difference between Notre Dame and Miami in 2025 was negligible. If you look at the advanced stats, Utah, Ole Miss, Alabama, Texas, Texas A&M, USC, Vanderbilt and Oklahoma were all in the same tier.

Moving to 16 teams would alleviate some of that problem, but the move to 24 would get rid of it altogether. There will be debates between No. 24 and No. 25, but once you get down that far, the line between teams is so much more clear. There is far less risk of leaving out a worthy team.

Instead of thinking of this as diluting the field, think of it as ensuring that the champion of college football doesn't get to skate their way to the title. Every team will be battle tested. There's no hiding behind an easy schedule or reputation.

12. True Cinderella runs are unlocked

We all look at those matchups at the back end of the playoff and think they're bound to be blowouts, but you never know. A G5 team might have a Cinderella run in them. A team might get hot late after suffering early-season losses. A team might get healthy and hit their stride.

I'm not expecting a No. 20 seed to win a title, but it would still be fun to see one advance further than expected, like Miami did.

Since teams like Tulane and James Madison aren't taking a worthy Power 4 team's slot, we won't have to debate their own worthiness to make the field.

13. Every program and player has a realistic chance every year

Since the dawn of college football, if you wanted to participate in a championship chase, you had to play for a select number of teams. CFB has always been top heavy to an unreasonable degree. In the modern era, transferring to a powerhouse was the only way for players to get a taste of playoff action.

There are 138 teams in FBS. Since 2014, only 27 teams have made a playoff appearance. That's less than 20 percent. And that number has only ballooned because of the 12-team field. In the four-team era, only 15 programs ever earned a bid. In the NFL, 43 percent of teams make the playoffs every year.

Now with the growth of NIL and the expansion of the playoff, more teams than ever will have access to meaningful postseason games. Unlike bowl games, there is real incentive to play, limiting the number of opt-outs.

15. Top 24 feels fitting for college football

USA Today started releasing a top 25 college football ranking in 1983. By the end of the decade, the AP followed suit. Since then, top 25s have been an intrinsic part of college football. Even when the College Football Playoff arrived with a four-team field, the committee ranked a top 25.

For decades, we've seen the value of ranking the top 25 teams in the sport. Being a top 25 team has always been a status symbol. Yet we've excluded the full top 25 from championship contention most years. There's something poetic about expanding the playoff to fit all but one of those teams.

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