What's so bad about a 24-team playoff?

Please don't tell me it devalues the regular season

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

You are an alien lifeform hurtling towards Earth. Your vessel is shaped like the Sooner Schooner because your bosses thought this was funny. Your mission is to understand why Americans love college football so much, and the human forms you will take upon arrival have already set up a number of interviews with people who should be experts.

During data collection, one source offers the following as an example of what makes college football great: “Heck, this is a sport where, as recently as 2023, you could go undefeated and not play for a national title (sorry, Florida State).”

You collect a lot of data, but this answer sticks with you. You try to process it through your human rationale emulator, which each of the envoys downloaded from the Blob of Thought before departing Planet Biletnikoff. Even though you’re dumbed all the way down to earthling level, it still doesn’t make sense.

How is it good that a team won every game it could but couldn’t win it all? How is that a feature of this sport? Seems like a flaw to you, but source after source kept mentioning something about the regular season really mattering in college football. You listened but were unpersuaded. It didn’t seem to matter for Florida State¹ (whatever that is) in 2023 (whenever that was), yet this very example was held up as proof of the very thing it seemed to refute. Who would think like this?

Well, Stewart Mandel wrote that line in a column for The Athletic calmly titled “Stop them! A 24-team College Football Playoff will destroy the soul of college football.”² Not to pick on one column. No need, really, when opposition to a 24-team playoff—which the ACC and Big 12 threw their support behind last week, joining the Big Ten—seems to be the baseline opinion for most college football fans and pundits. As Mandel writes, “based on several³ online polls” close to 90% of college football fans oppose expanding the playoff from 12 to 24 teams.

Why? I am but a humble human, but like you—a being from a place with the technology for interplanetary travel and the wit to do it in a tiny, covered wagon—I don’t understand. Are we still pretending that people follow college football because every week some team’s national title hopes could end? Those are pretty high stakes, but they’ve been dwindling since just before the end of the previous century.

Yet, people continue to watch. The TV deals get bigger and the conferences get bigger so the TV deals can get even bigger and then the playoff gets bigger so…y’know. I don’t really care about money’s role in all this.

The opposition of fans is something that resonates with me, but maybe I’m too weak as I’ve already conceded defeat here based on…oh…the sport’s entire history. When has college football ever acted in the interest of the people who support it? While you think on it, I’ll be singing this to the tune of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”:

OU, TV, Big 12, SWC,

Ticket prices, selection show, Tuesday night Ohio

Cal in the ACC, forgot to cancel streaming fee

Pac-12 ,wiped away, what else do I have to say?

The expansion of the playoff is where the decentralized powers will finally come together and consider the fans? No harm in bringing it up, I suppose, but it seems like a defense doomed to fail. They’re going to do what they want.

Yet, people continue to watch. Not as many as watch the NFL, interestingly, which has a regular season where (pound the table for this part) the stakes are comparatively low. Somehow, it manages. As Chuck Klosterman wrote in a 2007 essay, the NFL (with its revenue sharing) was “arguably the most successful form of socialism in U.S. history.” This makes it less “American” than college football by default. Modern college football might be the most American sport as it is still pure, uncut capitalism.

This is why you traveled all that way to understand it. But as you wing your way back to Biletnikoff, a troubling thought enters your emulated mind. If college football is the most American sport, it’s one where the American Dream doesn’t really exist.

It might on an individual level, sure. Diego Pavia is probably the best, most recent example. Nobody in the world thought this 0-star recruit was a future SEC starter and Heisman finalist. Nobody except Diego Pavia, and, unless he was winning games for your team or beating your rival, nobody liked him because the chip on his shoulder was big enough to blot out the sun. It’s how Vanderbilt won 10 games

But at a team level, the story of the sport is the most powerful wielding unchecked power. Vanderbilt got to live the American Dream for what will amount to a day in the grand scheme of things. Most likely, it will be Vanderbilt again in the near future because that’s how the sport works.

About halfway home now, you wonder if the most American sport/no American Dream thing is a contradiction in construction only. Maybe the contradiction actually increases college football’s Americanness. You think a 24-team playoff is probably fine. Contrary to the evidence collected, your determination is people don’t actually love college football for high-stakes games between teams they don’t follow, but even if they did, a larger playoff isn’t going to meaningfully reduce its meaning anyway. If they do it right, it might even enhance it in ways. It could speed up change. It could make the American Dream more attainable to more people.

That’s the consensus on the Schooner, but back on Earth it’s already 2036. They’ve already done what they want.

1. For what it’s worth, I felt horrible for Florida State in 2023 but understood the committee’s rationale given the circumstances. At no point did I think, “Man, what a great sport for this very reason.”

2. At least that was the headline on The Athletic homepage. Click over to the column itself and you got “An 8-4 team in the College Football Playoff is actually happening. Sound the alarm.”

3. Yeah, I don’t know, man. He links to a Twitter poll with 700 votes. That’s one online poll. I didn’t bother to look for more, but I don’t really doubt the 90% number.