College football season's continuing drama should quash talk of 14-team playoff

Last weekend’s college football upset extravaganza pretty much ended two arguments that have been raging around the sport for decades during its slow-walk from the antiquated poll era to the BCS to the College Football Playoff.

The first was that a real playoff like every other sport has would diminish the regular season. Wrong.

The second, from the other side of the spectrum, was that the playoff had to be expanded because it was excluding teams that were worthy of competing for a national championship. Also wrong.

Where we have landed in 2024 is what feels like a sweet spot: Tons of moments mattering that wouldn’t have otherwise mattered, like Arizona State fans flooding the field (twice) after beating BYU because of its implications for the Big 12 title race, while also ensuring every team has a fair opportunity to get in the field. Nobody really believes that Arizona State is going to win a national championship, but having a pathway into the playoff for a team that went 3-9 last year and would have otherwise been irrelevant this season is a huge net positive for the sport.

And as we sit here with one week left in the regular season, we can be assured the drama will continue: Another 18 or so games this weekend alone will have playoff implications, and they will create a whole new set of debates about which teams are in line for the final few spots.

It’s equally clear, though, that expanding the playoff further is unnecessary. Even now, it seems possible a team that has had a pretty mediocre season — maybe 8-3 Alabama or 9-2 Clemson — will find its way through the back door into the 12-team field as others crumble.

Expanding to 14 teams, as some of the conference commissioners have proposed when the new CFP contract takes effect in 2026, is not likely to increase the season's entertainment value much, if at all. But it would almost certainly provide lifelines for teams that have not achieved much on the field and have no chance of winning the championship.

Fine. Whatever. The difference between a 12- and 14-team playoff is so negligible it’s not worth getting upset about.

The problem, though, is the justification for why the commissioners, led by the SEC’s Greg Sankey and the Big Ten’s Tony Petitti, have pushed for another expansion. They want those bids to themselves, and they want to codify the distinction between the two richest conferences and everyone else.

In fact, when they first floated the 14-team proposal, the SEC and Big Ten wanted four automatic bids each.

Translated to this season in the Big Ten, that would have meant neither Penn State’s thrilling 26-25 win at Minnesota nor Indiana’s blowout loss to Ohio State last weekend would have mattered at all. Nittany Lions coach James Franklin wouldn’t have needed to make some gutsy calls down the stretch, including a fake punt, nor would we have been paying close attention to how Indiana matched up against an elite opponent because they’d have both locked up their playoff spots long before.

In the SEC, the debate wouldn’t be whether Alabama, Ole Miss or Texas A&M can still get into the playoff despite a third loss, it would be which one gets a guaranteed fourth spot that none of them did much to earn.

After internal and external pushback, the four-bid guarantee died on the vine. The next proposal centered around each of them getting three automatic bids, while the ACC and Big 12 got two apiece with a spot reserved for the top-ranked Group of Five champion. That one was also unpopular. The eventual format for 2026 remains up in the air, pending further discussions after this season.

The SEC and Big Ten initially argued for multiple automatic bids under the premise that expansion to 16 teams and the addition of several big brand names has made their leagues significantly stronger than the others. While that’s true if you look at the leagues holistically, it has not played out that way with individual teams. If anything, the real-world effect of expansion has diluted schedules to such an extent that the top SEC and Big Ten teams actually seem weaker than they would have been before.

Just look at Texas, which sits at 10-1 heading into a matchup this weekend at Texas A&M that will decide who plays Georgia in the SEC championship game. Is Texas a playoff lock even if it loses? Most likely yes. But when you look under the hood at the Longhorns’ record, they haven’t beaten a single team currently ranked in the top 25. Their best wins came against 6-5 Oklahoma, 6-5 Vanderbilt, 6-5 Florida and 6-5 Michigan. If they don’t beat the Aggies, there will be a legitimate case to exclude Texas from the Playoff altogether.

An SEC fan would argue that it’s not easy to win all the games Texas won, as Alabama and Ole Miss proved last weekend. But for the last couple of decades, SEC superiority was based on the idea that the great teams in its league were automatically playing the toughest schedules in the country, and that the best teams should be able to weather those challenges as the great Alabama or LSU or Georgia teams did. Now, they want their members to be treated like trust-fund babies.

If the SEC only gets three teams in the Playoff this year, which seems like a real possibility at the moment, the league will only have itself to blame. Yes, the SEC is still the strongest league top-to-bottom and will put the most players in the NFL. But when you expand to 16 teams while only playing half of your league members in a given season, it’s less a conference at that point and more of a scheduling federation. And if you judge Texas by the schedule it has played, rather than the SEC logo on its uniform, we should all demand that the Longhorns make their case this weekend with a win in College Station.

What’s better for the sport: Watching to see if a team can earn its way in or relying on quotas that Sankey leveraged from his colleagues in a backroom deal? What’s better: Seeing whether Penn State has the chutzpah to hold off Minnesota in a tough road environment or having the security of knowing that the Big Ten’s political power is going to get them in no matter what?

No playoff format is perfect, and there will always be someone who feels aggrieved by getting left out. The commissioners should probably tweak the format with the first-round byes a little bit to ensure that a Big 12 champion ranked No. 10 or 11 doesn’t get the No. 4 seed, which could skew the bracket in a weird way.

But the excitement and drama from this spectacular college football season have proven that you don’t need to expand the Playoff any more, and you certainly don’t need to prop the Big Ten and SEC up with a bunch of automatic bids because they’ll have too many contenders to handle.

If anything, it’s proven to be the opposite. Everyone with a real shot at winning the title will be in the 12-team field, and nobody who gets left out will have a good argument to be in. They should keep it that way.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: College football's lasting drama should quash talk of 14-team playoff