College Football Playoff expansion is the dumbest conversation in the sport right now. The Big Ten wants 24 teams, the SEC wants 16, and somehow we’re all supposed to act like this is what’s holding the game back.
It’s not. It’s just the cleanest way for the people at the top to squeeze more money out of a product they barely understand. Half these suits couldn’t tell you the difference between a quarterback and a kicker, but they’re ready to double the playoff field like they’re upgrading a streaming plan.
And no, this isn’t an “NIL ruined my childhood” post. Players getting paid is the sport now. That’s fine. The transfer portal is fine. The sport evolving is fine. The problem is college football keeps sprinting toward “more” without fixing what’s broken. If you’re going to expand the playoff, at least pretend you care about the stuff that actually impacts the games.
Because right now? We’re doing way too much, and it’s in all the wrong places.
College Football Playoff Expansion Is About Pockets, Not Parity
We just got to a bigger playoff and we already want to go bigger. That should tell you everything.
The sales pitch is always the same: more teams means more hope, more drama, more fanbases involved late. Sounds great until you remember what actually happens when a top-5 roster plays the 18th-best team in the country. You don’t get magic. You get a three-touchdown lead by halftime and a fourth quarter where the only suspense is whether somebody’s knee explodes on a meaningless drive.
Expanding to 16 or 24 doesn’t magically create more elite teams. It just hands more playoff spots to teams that weren’t good enough to win their conference, weren’t good enough to avoid two ugly losses, and weren’t built to survive four rounds of football. You want the regular season to matter? Then stop turning the postseason into an entry-level participation ribbon.
If the goal is better football, expansion is not the first lever you pull. It’s the last.
Pay the Players, But Stop Letting Contracts Be Fairy Tales
Players should be treated like employees. Full stop.
This is already a professional sport in everything but honesty. The money is pro. The training is pro. The pressure is pro. The only thing that isn’t pro is the structure, and that’s where everything falls apart.
I don’t mind players transferring. If your coach can leave, you should be able to leave. If your position coach gets fired, you shouldn’t be trapped. If you got lied to in recruiting, you should be able to move. That’s real life.
But what isn’t good is this growing trend of “sign a deal, take the bag, and then try to null and void it when you feel like it.” The Demond Williams-type situation is exactly why the sport needs to grow up. If a player signs something and can just walk away with zero clarity and zero enforcement, schools are going to start suing. And if schools sue, there’s a real chance they lose because the rules are a mess and the legal ground is shaky.
That’s not anti-player. That’s pro-reality.
If you want contracts, then make them real contracts:
- clear terms
- clear enforcement
- clear transparency on what happens if somebody bails
- actual standards so every case isn’t a brand-new legal experiment
Right now the sport is pretending it’s halfway amateur and halfway pro, and that’s why nobody trusts anything. Fans don’t know what’s real, coaches don’t know what sticks, and players are walking into situations where the “agreement” might be written in pencil.
Fix Targeting: Make It Tiered Like Flagrant Fouls
Targeting is the quickest fix in college football, which is exactly why it never gets fixed.
The current rule is a blunt instrument. Sometimes it’s absolutely needed. There are hits that are dirty, reckless, and deserve an ejection. But there are also plays where a defender is running full speed, the ball carrier drops his head at the last second, and now we’re ejecting somebody because he didn’t defy physics.
That’s insane.
There should be levels to targeting like the NBA has flagrant fouls:
- Targeting 1: 15 yards, automatic review, no ejection unless it’s a second offense
- Targeting 2: ejection for the truly reckless, malicious stuff
It still protects players. It still punishes dangerous hits. It also stops ruining games because of a bang-bang play that looks awful in slow motion but was never intentional.
If the sport is serious about safety, it needs smarter rules, not lazier punishments.
Mega Conferences Are Dumb: If You Don’t Play Them, Why Are They in Your League?
Conference realignment has officially jumped the shark.
We’ve got conferences so big now that “conference play” doesn’t even mean what it used to. You can go years without playing certain teams in your own league. Rivalries get treated like optional content. Schedules are stitched together for TV windows instead of competitive balance.
And it kills the thing fans actually care about: consistency and meaning.
If you’re not playing every team in your conference at least within a reasonable cycle, what’s the point? You’re not in a conference. You’re in a brand.
At minimum, bring back something that guarantees the games that should never disappear. Divisions, pods, protected rivalries, call it whatever you want. But there is no world where certain matchups shouldn’t happen every year. If you’re going to sell the sport on tradition and rivalries, then stop treating them like an inconvenience.
The Playoff Committee Is a Black Box and Nobody Knows the Rules
This is the part that makes the sport feel rigged even when it isn’t.
Nobody knows what the committee wants, and I’m not convinced the committee knows either.
Do wins matter? Yes, unless they don’t.
Do losses matter? Depends on who you are.
Does strength of schedule matter? Sometimes, unless a brand name is involved.
Should you schedule tough nonconference games? Maybe, unless you get punished for losing them.
Why did Team A get in over Team B when Team B had the better wins but Team A “looked better”? Who knows.
Fans aren’t mad because their team gets left out. Fans are mad because the process feels like vibes.
There needs to be a definitive scale. A public rubric with real weighting:
- quality wins
- strength of schedule
- bad loss penalty
- conference championship bonus
- clear tiebreakers
And if the committee deviates, they should have to explain exactly why in plain English. No more “the room felt…” like this is a poetry reading.
If you want people to respect the playoff, they have to understand how you’re picking teams.
Fix the Calendar: Shorten the Layoff and Move the Portal Out of the Season
College football’s timeline is a mess.
The gap from conference championship week to playoff games drags. The layoff for teams with a bye drags even worse. You spend all season building momentum, then you sit around long enough to forget what momentum even feels like.
And the transfer portal opening during the season is malpractice, especially when it overlaps the playoff. You’re asking kids to choose between chasing a national title and protecting their future. That’s a ridiculous spot to put players in.
Here’s what needs to happen:
- the portal should not open during the season at all, bowls and playoffs included
- shorten the dead time between conference title games and playoff games
- stop giving teams a layoff so long it turns the first playoff game into a rust contest
- crown the national champion on Jan 1 or, at the latest, the second Monday in January
College football is at its best when it moves like a heartbeat. Week to week, stakes rising, teams either breaking or proving they’re real. The current calendar kills that.
Stop Expanding the Playoff Until You Fix What’s Actually Broken
If college football leaders want to expand the playoff because it helps the sport, they should be able to explain how it improves the product on the field.
But right now, expansion talk feels like a distraction. It’s the easiest shiny object. It’s also the one that lines pockets without requiring anyone to solve a hard problem.
Fix the contracts and the rules around player movement so it’s not the Wild West. Fix targeting so games aren’t decided by slow-motion guesswork. Fix conferences so schedules and rivalries make sense. Fix the committee so the process isn’t a mystery box. Fix the calendar so the postseason doesn’t step on itself.
Do that first.
Then we can talk about whether the 19th-best team in the country deserves a playoff spot, or if we’re just adding more blowouts so executives can brag about “growth” while fans argue about seeding.
Because if the sport keeps choosing money over clarity and money over structure, it’s going to wake up one day and realize the only thing it expanded was the list of reasons people stopped caring.
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