Stop your fiddling and stick to a decision
No amount of tweaks is going to make the CFP better
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the College Football Playoff will look a little different next year.
That’s right, for the third time in as many years, the Playoff has been tweaked once again by the College Football Playoff Management Committee. Despite staying at 12 teams, instead of the 16-team or 24-team proposals being bandied around, the field will look fundamentally different than before.
What changes were made?
The big one was yet another revision to the automatic bid system, where instead of the top five conference champions, the four Power Four champions will automatically get a seat in the playoff. That would include 8-5 Duke, for those at home, instead of James Madison.
But the Management Committee didn’t stop there. They also gave an auto-bid to conference-less Notre Dame, provided the Fighting Irish finish within the Committee’s top 12 teams. Notre Dame would’ve jumped Miami - who nearly won the National Championship - for the final spot.
Of course, that’s not all. In a little-seen part of the Memorandum of Understanding that’s guiding the playoff now, the Group of Six bid also gets shaken up. Now, it’s just the highest rated Group of Six team and conference champion status doesn’t matter.
Wait, how did this happen?
That, my friends, is a great question.
Most of the changes come from the signed Memorandum of Understanding that I mentioned earlier. This was signed by the members of the CFP Executive Committee - the 10 conference commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua - during the December 2024 negotiations to extend the playoff’s media rights deal with ESPN through the 2031-32 season.
This Memorandum of Understanding essentially granted the Big Ten and SEC full autonomy to dictate the future of the playoff, with the other eight conferences and two independents along for the ride. With the two league commissioners, Tony Petitti for the Big Ten and Greg Sankey for the SEC, in a stalemate on the future playoff formats, that means nothing aside from that Memorandum of Understanding can be agreed upon.
So what does this mean going forward?
Well, it places a premium on the conference championships now, as it’s guaranteed that the Power Four champions get a seat. With how the ACC played out this year, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that any of the Power Four leagues has a surprise champion like that.
I don’t think the Group of Six bid changing from a fifth champion to the highest rated one will have much of any impact. If we’re being honest, the highest rated Group of Six team will be the highest rated one 99 percent of the time. I can’t think of a time where that wasn’t the case. Both Boise State and Tulane would’ve gotten bids the past two seasons and they were the clear best of the Group of Six.
To me, the biggest thing is the Notre Dame bid. With signs of strife between the Fighting Irish and ACC and Notre Dame being left on the outside, it seemed like there would’ve been momentum for the Irish to finally join a league. No more. Now, Notre Dame can sit back and snipe bids away from other teams, potentially someone who loses a conference championship game.
If any of these changes are going to cause some major discourse in future seasons ,it’s that one. Not just because it’s Notre Dame, but because one school gets such an infinitely preferential treatment embedded in the operating documents of the College Football Playoff.
Make no mistake: the Notre Dame automatic bid is going to cause problems. But, that’s not the biggest problem in this new playoff format. Instead, it’s the fact that nobody can leave it alone.
The BCS was plagued with the same issues, including constant tweaking of the formulas to ensure the “right” teams were getting into the championship game. Now, with more teams in the field, we’re doing the same things. Stop. It’s time to let the format play out for some time and see what changes actually need to be made.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be proactive and make changes that are necessary. I don’t think you’ll hear anyone say the move to straight seeding wasn’t an improvement over what the first 12-team bracket had. But what does enshrining a pro-Notre Dame clause fix? The fact that the Irish got left out this year? It wasn’t that, because the Memorandum of Understanding was signed before this season.
We can talk about solutions all we want, but it’s clear the Big Ten and SEC want to maintain the status quo and consolidate money towards their two leagues. That’s what we see in the change to eliminate performance-based payouts and instead moving to flat payouts of 29 percent of the CFP revenue to the Big Ten and SEC, 17 percent to the ACC, 12.5 percent to the Big 12 and roughly 10 percent to each of the remaining leagues.
If this seems like an incredibly pro-Big Ten and SEC deal, that’s because it is. The Memorandum of Understanding was signed after major instability where the two leagues gobbled up any valuable team and threatened to split off into their own superleague. The remaining eight conferences made this deal because they thought it would save the way college football was structured.
That’s still a concern for sure, but the Big Ten and SEC may wield too much power. Who knows. Either way, it’s time to stop tweaking and just let it play out. At a certain point, we have to stop the obsession over picking the right teams or the best teams or the most deserving teams. Just lay out a criteria and allow teams to reach it. That way everyone knows what the end goal is and how to get there.
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The problem isn't size or structure; they need to be crystal clear about the criteria. They seem to jump around every year, i.e., recent form vs overall season performance, or does losing a conference championship game count you out? They need clear criteria.
The ND and auto conference champ qualifiers are huge 👎👎👎👎