Why doesn't college football just adopt the Champions League model?

When this sport is ready to start making sense, the UCL has already shown how to crown a champion, create an exciting tournament and continue making a boatload of money.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

The UEFA Champions League (UCL) only includes anywhere from 33-to-47% champions in any given year. The name is technically a misnomer, but it’s an elegant name and comes with an earwormy anthem, so overall it’s a net positive. The UCL, if you’re not deep into soccer, is Europe’s biggest club competition. It includes the champions of leagues in the Union of European Football Associations, but the competition also makes room for second-, third- and fourth-place teams from certain leagues.

I won’t bog things down with a lengthy description of the qualifying parameters—go here for that complete overview—but the biggest leagues (England, Italy, Spain, Germany, France) get four teams in the UCL, the next tier (think Belgium, Scotland, Portugal, et al) are guaranteed two spots and the smaller domestic leagues might only qualify their league champions.

Sound similar to anything you experienced around American football this fall, the dawn of our 12-team College Football Playoff era? Or at least it could be similar if this sport ever decided to answer the one question it has always avoided: Do you want this to make sense?

The UCL makes sense. Every team in the top division of its domestic league knows exactly how it could qualify for the sport’s top tournament. The surest way, and sometimes only way, is to do the thing any club already wants to do most—win the league. The UCL is a massive and exciting competition, but the primary goal of any, say, English club is to win the Premier League. The second-biggest prize is to finish in the top four, earning a UCL spot and the truckload of additional money that comes with it in addition to the prestige of making it.

This is basically where the CFP appears headed. It’s virtually certain the playoff will expand in the coming years and the two heavyweights in college athletics, the Big Ten and SEC, have already been angling for four guaranteed spots. In a 14-team field, the Big 12 and ACC probably argue for and get two spots each, so that’s 12 spots filled from the top four conferences. That would leave two spots, one for best champion from the rest of conferences and one, I guess, wildcard needed because Notre Dame refuses to get on board. Fine. There are better formats but that’s a longer discussion for another day.

For now, college football can start making sense in small steps. A Champions League-like approach was about all I thought about from October on as the, frankly quite annoying, CFP talk heated up. Can we please just make this a process instead of a beauty contest? College football has always been the latter—which I sort of enjoyed before there was a playoff—but now it’s more annoying than enduring.

I know the last thing the world needs is another “what if college football worked like soccer?” column, but I wanted to at least satisfy my own curiosity by rerunning the 2024 Big Ten football season as if the conference’s top-four finishers were guaranteed spots in the CFP based on a points system.

Two spoilers: 1) It doesn’t change the four teams that actually made the field, and 2) I think it’s better for fans in almost every way.

The Upside

The primary benefit of a UCL approach to the playoff is simple—no more debate. Instead of talking about which teams deserve a spot or how certain conferences should be valued—that’s already decided—everyone instead gets to focus on conference races. And the conference races will be much more interesting for more teams when the goal is to finish in the top four if winning the conference is off the table.

In soccer, team standings aren’t determined by win-loss record, but by a points system. Teams get three for a win, one for a draw and zero for a loss. College football doesn’t have draws any more—though I’d be receptive to bringing them back—but I still wanted to try a points system, so I decided to award three points for a road conference win and two for a home conference win. Not married to that, but home teams win straight up about 60% of the time since 2005 so this very basic setup at least rewards teams accordingly.

Doing that, here’s how the Big Ten would’ve looked at the end of October:

One mild shock there as Wisconsin has a hold on the fourth spot while Ohio State is sitting fifth. Contextually, however, I doubt anyone would’ve been freaking out for the Buckeyes. OSU had two bye weeks prior to November, so it had time to make up ground.

The bigger story is that no team, with a month left in the season, is technically eliminated. Even zero-point Purdue, which also had two early byes, had 13 points left on its schedule if it won out. Practically speaking the Boilermakers weren’t going to finish top-four with 13 points—and would’ve been treated as such—but theoretically they were alive.

Realistically, the cutoff point for serious top-four discussion probably would’ve been Nebraska. Sitting on five points, it had 10 more available to it if it won out. Where would 15 points have put a team?

Here are the actual standings from the end of the regular season:

Illinois finished with 15 points, one spot out of CFP qualification, and that feels about right for what was, probably, the Big Ten’s fifth-best team once it was all said and done.

The 2024 season would’ve been a bit unique with the four playoff spots locked up entering the Big Ten’s final week. Not great for drama down the list, but each of the top-four teams would’ve been alive to win the conference title with one game to go. Oregon would’ve been the only team that controlled its own destiny.

Not bad for a first, just-spitballing-here attempt.

FAQ

Or, at least the questions I’ve frequently asked myself. You may have more, which I’m happy to answer in the comments.

Q: Wait, so what about conference championship games?

A: Ideally, they’re gone. With a few additional tweaks, I think an entire conference season is enough to decide the champion. It used to be before conferences couldn’t stop expanding. Now, we know there’s no incentive for the leagues or their television partners to give up that 13th game, so if (many millions of) cents continue to outweigh sense, an old fix is required—divisions.

Just dividing the Big Ten geographically and giving the top two finishers in the West and East the playoff spots, gives you “true” results in the divisions (because every team would play every division team) and the chance to have a conference championship game between the two top finishers.

That would’ve produced Oregon and Illinois from the West and Indiana and Penn State from the East, with a tie-breaker needed to determine which team would play the Ducks. And, yes, in this division format, Ohio State’s season-finale loss to Michigan would’ve kept it out of the playoff.

Q: Aren’t unbalanced schedules still a serious problem?

A: Yep. You can diminish that somewhat with divisions, so at least the schedules are closer to balanced within those, but then you still have the question the Big Ten never was able to answer of how do you balance the divisions? “You don’t,” is the answer, at least not long-term, because team strength will always change in unexpected ways. At a certain point, you just have to live with it in exchange for the joy simplicity can bring. Every team in a divided Big Ten knows it can make the playoff by finishing first or second and it will play every division team to get there.

Q: Does the scoring system unfairly favor teams with favorable road schedules?

A: Probably. The Premier League has 20 teams, and each team plays every other home-and-home. It’s a good way around strength-of-schedule debates and obviously not possible in college football. But schedules aren’t equal with the current system, so it’s not like we’re losing anything.

Q: Ohio State has looked like the best team in the country in the current CFP, is a system where it’s out all that good?

A: Fair question, but that’s old college football thinking. The key benefit of a UCL approach is to eliminate the eye test. That would mean, in certain scenarios, one or two of the best teams might get left out every once and a while. Don’t know what else to tell you other than if Ohio State hadn’t lost to a Michigan team with no passing game as a three-score favorite on its home field then the Buckeyes could’ve had the same CFP run they’ve had this year.

Q: Is more expansion necessary to make this really come together?

A: Perhaps. A 20-team Big Ten—hi, Notre Dame—would be tidier for two 10-team divisions that would keep the conference schedule at nine games. If the SEC is committed to an eight-game schedule, it should get to 18 teams and split into divisions. I think the real dream is to get down to eight total conferences, no independents. Then you’re set up for a 16-team field with bids as follows: four each for the Big Ten and SEC, two each for the Big 12 and ACC and one each for the four conferences left standing. (Has C-USA ever actually felt like a real conference anyway?) Then, if you want to get really fair with things—another thing college football has avoided to same degree as making sense—give conferences the ability to earn and lose bids based on performance up to the maximum of four, something the actual UCL has.

Q: If I’ve got this right, then a team from the Big Ten’s new West would never play a team in the regular season from the new East?

A: That’s right, and I know this is a pretty big hurdle. It would be an unfortunate outcome of change, but we’ve learned to get used to that, right? I was fine when the numbers in conference names were accurate, but here we are, trying to just claw back some sanity for the sport.

Q: What are nonconference games in this new world, glorified exhibitions?

A: Maybe to start, but teams would quickly realize that they should use that portion of the season to get them ready to compete for a CFP spot. (Think how Nebraska volleyball uses its nonconference season.) It might seem counterintuitive, but with a nonconference loss not impacting playoff qualification at all, I think fans would actually get more good nonconference games. Teams could also use those games to maintain any rivalries both sides care about continuing.

Or the more advanced option for the fantasy world where playoff bids by conference were up for contention, use the nonconference slate to determine those. The Big Ten might, for example, have a year where it faces off against the Big 12 and MAC, with the conference-versus-conference results used to determine the future allotment of bids using some sort of agreed-upon formula (also part of the UCL). That would add plenty of intrigue to the nonconference slate even with it totally divorced from the playoff chase.

Q: The deeper we get, the more questions I have. Will this post ever end?

A: Yes. The TL;DR version of this idea is that as college football evolves toward a postseason-based sport—as most sports are—we could remove a lot of nonsense by just codifying how teams qualify for the thing. The model that offers the best fit for college football’s quirkiness is, in my view, the UEFA Champions League, a union of individual leagues that somehow has figured out how to crown a champion of Europe ever year, produce an extremely exciting tournament and make a boatload of money doing it. There’s no need for the European Kirk Herbstreit to get mad about who’s in and nobody has to get mad at European Kirk for being mad about who’s in because the system may not be perfect, but it makes sense.