Welcome to college football's new reality: Make the 24-team playoff or get fired
If you thought the 12-team playoff created a world of FOMO for everyone who didn’t get in, just wait until two-thirds of the power conference schools realize every November that they landed on the wrong side of a pass-fail test.
Key points
- But will more playoff access really calm down the “Fire Everyone” culture that seems to be increasingly pervasive in college football?
- As support grew for the College Football Playoff to expand from 12 to 24 teams, money was not the primary factor.
- But replacing conference championship games with a bunch of first-round playoff games was not, on its own, a big enough pot of gold to blow up the entire sport and risk losing the sanctity of the regular season.
As coaches and administrators experienced the 12-team playoff, they came to the conclusion — and probably correctly — that nothing resonates with fans anymore besides getting into the field.
Additional details
- Even if Curt Cignetti getting Indiana to the playoff in Year 1 and winning a national title in Year 2 is the extreme example, he’s far from alone in using the transfer portal to engineer an immediate turnaround.
- When the standard is really, really high to make the playoff, you can at least rationalize not making it.
- It’s inevitable that, starting next year, fans and boosters will consume college football in a much more binary fashion: You’re either in or you’re out, and it’s a big problem if you’re out.
- Even now, in the 12-team version, we have seen good teams like Texas, Notre Dame and Vanderbilt last year all fall short because there wasn’t enough room and the margin for error was small.
- At the same time, college football is undergoing an Overton window revolution on what kind of season is acceptable for a new coach.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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