A 14-team College Football Playoff is a terrible idea

Most of all, the College Football Playoff Committee has shown they can do one thing very well, but it hits them at every opportunity.

Earlier this week, Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger reported that the CFP committee is considering the possibility of expanding the playoffs to 14 teams.

The NCAA adopted a four-team playoff system in 2014 after complaints that there weren’t enough opportunities to compete for a national title. After 10 years of four-team playoffs, the committee decided to expand to 12 teams entering the 2024 season.

This is a terrible idea for many reasons, the first of which is simple. Expanding to 14 teams more or less renders the regular season meaningless. Conference championship games don’t mean much. Win or lose, both teams still have a chance to make the playoffs. Given the way the auto-bidding works, it really seems like this is going to be the Big Ten/SEC Invitational and everyone else just wants their team to get it. What makes the college football regular season so special is that almost every game is important. He probably can’t drop more than two games in the conference. If we don’t do that, we won’t make it to the playoffs. The expansion to 14 players leaves the margin for error wide open for teams like: Ole Miss Starting last year, the third-best team in the SEC can make the playoffs even if they drop a few games and don’t even make it to the SEC Championship Game.

Expanding the CFP always felt a little risky, even with 12 teams. Because when you get into the business of big bidding and you get 14 teams, it gets too out of control. It makes no sense to expand the CFP to 14 teams without testing whether 12 teams will work. The simple truth is that there probably aren’t 14 teams that deserve to be in the national championship. Although the number of spots available for the four-team or eight-team playoffs is limited, the regular season still has significance. Expansion to 12 teams would change the structure of the sport. 14 teams are going to totally tear it up.

Here are all the reasons why the playoffs could be expanded at the end of this road. CFP hopes to make more money by extending the TV event to raise more funds. This is overextension by people who don’t need to play the game to make more money, and it won’t go to the people who need to play the game more.

The playoffs are a television event, with millions of viewers watching the same rankings each week, with an even deeper dive in the previous three playoff games. Expand that to 14 teams, and you’ll see that bags of money start to look like Looney Tunes characters in the eyes of the committee. This is the unfortunate but inevitable conclusion that those in power at the NCAA have always drawn. There’s too much money in this cash cow for them to spread over their heads, and the very fact that it’s taken out feels like a dangerous omen rather than just a possibility.

But don’t get me wrong. This only serves to line the pockets of those in power, and it is incredibly stupid to do it without any logic or reason.