The first 12-team iteration of the College Football Playoff had four chances to produce a competitive first-round game. It did not succeed.
Notre Dame destroyed Indiana, Penn State snatched SMU’s soul, Texas got a minor handful from Clemson but still won easily, and Ohio State capped the weekend with an annihilation of Tennessee, 42–17, sending tens of thousands of Volunteers fans home, sad and cold.
The games prompted lots of pissing, moaning, and revisionism from fans and media alike. ESPN’s Paul Finebaum urged the playoff selection committee to take a bow for giving us so many “blockbusters.” The network’s star commentator Kirk Herbstreit said that Indiana, an 11–1 team, did not belong on the field with Notre Dame. Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin, whose team went 9–3 including a loss to 4–8 Kentucky, repeatedly needled the committee for including non-SEC teams with slightly better records. ProFootballTalk opined, “A 12-team college football playoff sounds like a great idea until it’s all lesser teams going on the road to play better teams in late December and getting their asses kicked.”
These people are all making different points but missing some important ones. The 12-team playoff was never about giving 12 teams a chance to win the national title, something no system can do because the sport never has 12 teams capable of that. It was certainly not about guaranteeing there would be more close games in the playoff. To the contrary, it was about giving more teams the necessary illusion that they could reach the mountaintop and expanding a widely viewed television product.
The latter is worth criticizing, but the first-round games’ lack of competitiveness is less a commentary on the playoff than on the sport it represents. College football is a sport of dud games, all the time, at all levels. That is why the good games are so memorable. If your barometer for a good postseason setup is how many close games it produces, you will have to give up and become a fan of another sport.
College football, whether in the playoff or not, is not the place to hunt for close games. The 2024 college football season has had 884 games involving teams from the top level, the Football Bowl Subdivision. Of those, 125 (14 percent) have come down to a margin within a field goal, 309 (35 percent) to within one score, and 363 (41 percent) to within 10 points. Meanwhile, 39 percent of these games have had margins of three touchdowns or more, my threshold for a blowout. The percentage of lopsided games is only slightly lower when both teams are from the power conferences (or Notre Dame, an independent school). In those cases, still less than half of games this year stayed within 10 points.
Maybe we can get even more specific in hunting for close games. Of the 30 College Football Playoff games from the event’s founding as a four-team tournament in 2014 through 2023, 10 games came down to a one-score margin. Thirteen games, almost half, had three-touchdown margins. The BCS Championship, operative from 1998 through 2013, had six one-score games and five in which the winner beat the loser by between 21 and 36 points. The game had its classics, no doubt. But for every Vince Young game-winner over USC at the Rose Bowl, there was an Alabama beating Notre Dame by 28.
No season has ever had enough teams to fill a 12-team tournament with sincere national title contenders. Twelve is around the number of programs that could win a title sometime, because they have enough money to get the best players and coaches. But I’d ballpark the number of true title contenders most years at between three and six. (This year, I think the number is five: Oregon, Georgia, Ohio State, Texas, and Notre Dame. ) In most large tournaments, no one considers that disparity a problem. The fun of the NCAA basketball tournament’s first round is the occasional huge upset. Playing in the tournament is a prize that makes the regular season more meaningful for smaller conferences. All of that is considered well and good, and most people don’t advise shrinking the tournament every time a No. 2 seed beats a No. 15 by 38 points.
A nice thing about a 12-team playoff in football is that anyone who didn’t make the field really did not have a shot to win the whole thing. In the four-team iteration, a few teams that finished fifth or sixth really may have had a path to the title. It was their fault that they didn’t make it (unless they were an undefeated Central Florida that got left out, for instance), but it’s natural to play the what-if game. There’s really no need for that in the 12-team format.
Alabama, a 9–3 team that lost to mediocre Vanderbilt and Oklahoma, was not going to win it all this year and probably would have gotten dump-trucked just like Indiana if it were playing at Notre Dame on Friday. Teams with three losses aren’t going to suddenly win four in a row.
Alabama and Ole Miss are very likely “better” than SMU and Indiana. But losing games has to matter or the whole season sacrifices meaning at the altar of this made-for-TV tournament. Those teams didn’t play this weekend, so it’s easy to pretend that they’d have done a lot better. But history shows us that even when playoff games were exclusively at neutral sites and limited to top-four teams, blowouts were frequent. The average margin of defeat in the four-team playoff was 18.6 points. This weekend it was 19.3, with all of the losers playing in raucous road environments. What did everyone expect?
Hand-wringing over these four lopsided games betrays a misunderstanding or forgetfulness about how college football works. It is a volatile game played by teenagers, clustered across more than 130 teams in just the top classification. Each team plays 11 of them each year, making it impossible to measure the true strength of all of them with any precision beyond wins and losses. It turns out that when these teams get together, even the good and the great ones, someone is often on the business end of a domination.
It is this bias toward blowouts that makes good college football games so good. Vanderbilt beating Alabama is less cool if Vanderbilt hasn’t lost 23 in a row to Alabama coming in, with the last three coming by a combined score of 148–3. Appalachian State beating Michigan means less if the typical matchup between a Division I-AA team and a national power is not a 40-point win for the big boys. Even Georgia Tech losing to Georgia in eight overtimes, as it did a few weeks ago, is not as enrapturing if the expectation coming in is anything other than a comfortable Bulldogs win. These games all hit harder because college football is a sport of blowouts, not of parity.
None of that means 12 is the right number of teams or validates every committee pick. All it says is that a playoff system rife with first-round beatings is not some inappropriate outlier for college football or even for its postseason systems over time. Oklahoma used to make a regular sport out of getting its ass kicked in playoff games. That was not a crisis. Why should it be one now that Indiana is doing the same?
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