The 12-team College Football Playoff was a success

With just one game left to close out the 2024-25 college football season, we’ve seen enough to call it: The first 12-team College Football Playoff was an undeniable success.

There are minor issues that need to be resolved or changed, but the overall format change has been a net positive for the sport. More teams than ever were in playoff contention throughout the final month of the season, which meant more meaningful games were played each Saturday throughout the stretch. College football still has its usual heated debate over which teams should get the final spots in the bracket. And there were 11 CFP games instead of three at the end of the season – four of which were played in electric campus environments.

Interest in the sport has been strong throughout the season, with 11 regular season games topping 9 million viewers. The CFP first round matches averaged 10.6 million viewers, the quarters averaged 16.9, and the semifinals (played Thursday and Friday nights) averaged 19.2. With Monday night’s national championship game featuring two of the bluest blue bloods in Notre Dame and Ohio State, the crowd for the title game should also be massive.

It should also be noted that none of the participants in the championship match are undefeated. Notre Dame suffered an embarrassing loss to Northern Illinois in Week 2, then the Irish won 13 straight games to get here. Ohio State lost to its hated rival to end the regular season, but still knew it would qualify for the CFP.

“The new format has allowed our team to grow and build throughout the season,” Ohio State coach Ryan Day said. “As much as losses hurt, they really allow us as coaches and players to take a hard look at the issues and address them, and then it’s about resolving them over time.

“I think that’s really the most important thing I’ve learned about this format, which I think has been great for our players. I think it’s great for college football.

CFP Executive Director Rich Clark agreed that the event had achieved its objectives.

“We applied the format that we had set out, and that was the intent of the commissioner: that we executed it as best we could, to get the best teams in there and let them play for the championship,” Clark said . “It went very well.”

There was concern heading into the fall that the new format would shorten the regular season. Everyone knew teams didn’t need to be undefeated to advance to the group, so would the matches have less meaning? Ask Notre Dame fans after the loss to Northern Illinois if it stung less because they could win and make the playoffs. Or Ohio State fans after a fourth straight loss to Michigan, because of course the Buckeyes could still play for a national championship. In both college towns, the world still felt like its end was happening. Turns out there was still a lot of meaning.

Clark said he thought the regular season was the best he had seen in his life.

“When you talk about big games, there were a lot of them and it was very exciting,” Clark said. “We think the playoffs were a very good conclusion to a strong regular season.”

Clark said he expects conference commissioners who oversee the CFP will spend time this offseason reviewing draft and seeding processes as well as game sites. It is possible that adjustments will be made before the 2025-2026 season, but it is much more likely that substantial changes will not occur until the following season (when decisions will not require unanimous leadership). Sports decision-makers also expect to examine the value of conference championship games in the future — a separate but related topic.

Several experts have argued that the top four seed lines should not be reserved for conference champions in the future, because that requirement has unbalanced this year’s bracket. No. 3 seed Boise State and No. 4 seed Arizona State were ranked ninth and 12th, respectively, by the CFP selection committee. They should therefore have been ranked lower in the bracket if that corresponded to the actual final ranking. This caused some of the more dangerous overall teams, such as Notre Dame and Ohio State, to be ranked lower than they should have been. And top-seeded Oregon was eliminated by the Buckeyes in the quarterfinals.

Regardless, the bootstrap problem could have arisen organically, but it has been exacerbated by conference realignment in recent years. The initial bracket (and its conference championship requirement) was launched before Texas and Oklahoma left the Big 12 for the SEC and before the Big Ten added four West Coast schools, including Oregon. The fact that the Big Ten and SEC are now gobbling up more spots overall due to the teams they’ve added (and have a bunch of teams ranked in the top 10 overall) affects the relative strength of different conference champions . If the at-large teams from two conferences are stronger than the conference champions from two or three other leagues, that affects the bracket structure.

Still, the ranking issue was the only glaring problem with the new format. Everything else seemed to work well, especially the first round games played on campus – which received rave reviews, leading to the possibility of also moving future quarterfinal games from bowl sites to the campus.

“For the first time, I don’t think a lot of us are going to complain about this 12-team playoff,” Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said. “I can speak for us at DKR (Darrell K. Royal Memorial Stadium), hosting that first round game was electric. It was a great atmosphere.

“Playing two bowl games, from the Peach Bowl to the Cotton Bowl, (was) an incredible opportunity for our players. Is this exactly the right formula? I don’t know. Other people will have to look at this, but I think we’re off to a good start.

It is difficult to argue with Sargsyan on this point. It may not be perfect, but college football never is. It’s complicated. It’s complicated. And it sparks more debate than any other sport on the planet.

But this is a postseason format that ensures the best teams in the country can determine who the best team in the country is by playing it on the field. They don’t need to rely on polls or a computer formula to determine the national champion. These teams must determine it for themselves, round by round.

And that deserves to be celebrated.