A Bigger Playoff Wouldn’t Kill the Regular Season. Bad Incentives will.

This is such a hot topic on Twitter right now. I don't know that I'm super pro expansion to 24 teams, but this is a distillation of me talking for 15 minutes using Wispr Flow, responding to a bunch of different thoughts that people ask me about on Twitter. And yes, AI cleaned up my rambling monologue for me.

Hopefully you enjoy. Might do a couple more of these this summer. I hope you're enjoying the Summer School series as well.

The argument against expanding the College Football Playoff usually starts in the same place: it will kill the regular season.

I understand why people say that. College football has always been defined by scarcity. Every loss mattered. A bad Saturday in September could follow you until December. The sport’s regular season had a kind of week-to-week finality that made it different from almost every other sport in America.

But I think that argument misses what is actually happening.

The current system does not protect the regular season as much as people think. It protects the fear of losing. And when the fear of losing becomes too powerful, teams respond in the most rational way possible: they avoid games they might lose.

That is how you end up with a sport where major programs spend two or three Saturdays a year playing games nobody really wants to watch.

That is not protecting the regular season.

That is wasting it.

A Larger Playoff Would Make More Games Matter, Not Fewer

A larger playoff, if designed correctly, would not make fewer games matter. It would make more games matter. It would keep more teams alive deeper into the season. It would give more fan bases a reason to care about the national picture. It would create more meaningful games for television, donors, players, coaches, and the broader sport. And just as importantly, it would reduce the incentive for programs to schedule scared.

That is the part of this debate that does not get taken seriously enough.

College football has changed. The postseason has changed. The bowl system has been de-emphasized. Conference championship games have been de-emphasized. The playoff has become the center of the sport. NIL and revenue sharing have changed the way programs can build rosters. More teams now have the ability to compete above board for players they previously had a much harder time landing. More teams are being asked to invest like serious contenders.

But the postseason access point has not fully caught up to that reality.

The playoff format has to be reasonably related to the number of teams actually trying to compete. That does not mean everyone gets in. It does not mean every ambitious program deserves a participation trophy. It does not mean an 8-4 team should be treated like the No. 1 team in the country.

But it does mean the sport should ask itself a basic question:

If more programs are going to spend like contenders, build rosters like contenders, and be judged by whether they make the playoff, how many of them should have a realistic path to the thing that now defines success?

Right now, the answer may still be too few.

The Old Ecosystem Gave the Sport Breadth

For a long time, college football had multiple ways for teams to define a successful season. Winning a national title was one. Winning a conference was another. Beating your rival mattered. Making a major bowl mattered. Making a good bowl mattered. For some programs, making any bowl mattered. A 10-win season and a respected postseason destination could feel like a major achievement. A breakthrough season did not have to end in a national championship chase to feel meaningful.

That ecosystem gave the sport breadth.

Not every fan base had to believe its team could win the national title in order to care. There were other ladders to climb. There were other destinations that mattered. There were other ways to say, “This season was worth it.”

That world has eroded.

And it did not erode by accident.

The Pushback: Was the Old System Ever Really Fair?

A fair pushback to this argument is: when was that ever true in the bowl system?

If the question is whether the old bowl system gave every serious team a fair and proportionate path to the national championship, the answer is easy: it did not.

The old system was never clean title access. It was regional, political, tradition-bound, and often irrational. It regularly failed to produce the cleanest possible No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup. That is why the sport moved from the old poll-and-bowl world to the Bowl Coalition, the Bowl Alliance, the BCS, the four-team Playoff, and now the 12-team CFP. The Bowl Coalition itself was built around trying to match the highest-rated available teams while preserving regional and traditional ties, and it included the Orange, Sugar, Cotton, Fiesta, Gator, and Hancock bowls.

So no, I am not arguing that the old bowl system was some perfect meritocracy.

It obviously was not.

But that is not the point.

The point is that the old bowl system had a more reasonable relationship between the number of teams trying to matter and the number of postseason outcomes that still felt meaningful.

That is the distinction.

The old system did not distribute national championship access very well. But it did distribute postseason meaning.

Tiers of Success: How 30-Plus Programs Could Feel Good About a Season

And the point is not simply that the Rose, Sugar, Orange, Cotton, and Fiesta mattered. Obviously those were the biggest brands. The Rose Bowl in particular had a unique cultural role through its Big Ten/Pac-12 predecessor agreement, which the Tournament of Roses says began in 1946, with the first game under that agreement played on January 1, 1947.

But the broader point is that college football used to have enough postseason meaning spread across enough of the sport that legitimately 30-plus programs could finish a season feeling good about what they had done.

Not because all of them thought they were national champions.

Not because every bowl was equal.

Not because the system was fair.

But because the sport had tiers of success.

For the elite teams, the national title mattered. For conference champions, the traditional bowl destination mattered. For a very good team that fell short of the title race, a major bowl or respected second-tier bowl could still validate the season. For an 8-4 or 9-3 program trying to climb, a good bowl could signal progress. For a rebuilding program, simply getting bowl eligible and winning a postseason game could energize the fan base and give the staff something real to sell.

That was the genius of the old ecosystem, even with all its flaws.

A season did not have to end in a national championship to feel meaningful. A fan base could say, “We won 10 games.” “We won the conference.” “We beat our rival.” “We made a New Year’s Day bowl.” “We won our bowl.” “We finally got back to the postseason.” “This was our best season in 20 years.”

Those things were not all equal, but they were real.

That is what has changed.

The final BCS-era bowl season had 35 bowl games scheduled in 28 communities, which meant 70 available team slots in the postseason. The National Football Foundation’s 2013-14 bowl schedule release even framed bowls as bringing “a measure of importance” to the regular season. That is the ecosystem I am talking about. Not a perfect championship-access system, but a postseason structure where dozens of teams could end the year with something that felt like a real achievement.

The playoff era, especially the four-team playoff era, flattened that hierarchy.

It did not eliminate every other accomplishment. Rivalries still matter. Conference titles still matter. Ten-win seasons still matter. Bowls still exist. But it taught the sport to treat one thing as the real measure of national relevance: making the CFP.

Once that happens, a lot of seasons that used to feel successful start to feel like consolation prizes.

That is the incentive problem.

The old bowl system did not provide broad championship access. It provided broad postseason validation. It allowed a large number of programs — not five or six, not 12, but 30-plus in a given year — to plausibly end the season believing they had accomplished something meaningful.

The modern playoff system has taken much of that meaning and concentrated it into one event.

So when I say the postseason format needs some reasonable relationship to the size of the group actually investing and trying to matter, I do not mean the old system was a clean title-access machine. It obviously was not. I mean the old system had enough meaningful postseason outcomes to support the number of programs trying to define themselves as successful.

Now that the playoff has swallowed so much of that meaning, playoff access has to carry more of the burden.

You cannot devalue the bowls, weaken conference-title games, centralize the entire sport around the CFP, and then tell 30 or 40 serious programs that 12 spots is enough because the rest of the postseason technically still exists.

The games still exist.

The meaning has moved.

And again, that did not happen by accident.

The Rights Holder Helped Build This Hierarchy

The rights holder helped create this reality.

ESPN has been the exclusive home of the CFP since its inception, and the CFP/ESPN extension gives ESPN exclusive worldwide rights to the event through the 2031-32 season. ESPN also retained rights to ancillary programming around the playoff, including the selection show and weekly Top 25 rankings shows. ESPN’s own release says the company worked with the CFP over the previous decade to build it into one of the most prominent events in American sports.

That matters because the rights holder does not merely broadcast the postseason.

It helps define what the postseason means.

If you spend years centering the sport’s coverage around the playoff, if you make weekly rankings shows a major part of the sport’s conversation, if you build December around who is in and who is out, and if your premium inventory is the CFP itself, then you are training fans to understand the sport in playoff terms.

That is not some wild conspiracy theory.

That is how media incentives work.

The property with the highest value gets the most oxygen. The event with the biggest rights deal gets the most promotion. The postseason product that decides the national champion becomes the postseason product everything else is measured against.

That is exactly what happened.

The bowls still exist, but they do not carry the same weight. Some of that is because of opt-outs. Some of it is because of the transfer portal. Some of it is because coaches leave before bowl season. Some of it is because players are making rational decisions about their futures. But the larger reason is that the sport itself spent the last decade telling everybody that the playoff is the only postseason that truly matters.

Then people act shocked when the bowls feel diminished.

That is the part that bothers me.

The bowl system used to be one of college football’s most important incentive structures. It gave the sport layers. You could be outside the national title race and still be chasing something meaningful. You could finish the season in a bowl that, in context, told your fans the year had been a success.

The bowl system was not perfect. It was political, messy, commercial, and often absurd. But it did something important: it gave more teams a reason to care.

The playoff era has stripped a lot of that away.

And again, that is not because fans suddenly became stupid. It is because they were told, over and over, what mattered. They were told the playoff was the real postseason. They were told the committee rankings were the center of the sport. They were told the national championship race was the frame through which every major result should be understood.

So when a team goes 10-2 and misses the playoff, a bowl game does not feel like the same reward it used to feel like. When a player with NFL prospects sits out a non-playoff bowl, he is not betraying the sport. He is responding to the sport’s own hierarchy of value. When fans treat a non-playoff bowl like a consolation game, they are not inventing that attitude out of nowhere. They are reacting to what the sport has become.

That hierarchy was built.

And the rights holder had a huge role in building it.

Bowls as Inventory, Playoff as Status

The irony is that ESPN is also deeply invested in the bowl system. ESPN Events announced a 17-game owned-and-operated bowl schedule for the 2025-26 season, and ESPN Events says its broader 2025-26 academic-year event portfolio includes 17 college bowl games and accounts for more than 400 hours of live programming on ESPN platforms.

So ESPN has tried to have it both ways.

It has the playoff, which is the prestige product.

It has a large chunk of the bowl ecosystem, which is useful live inventory.

But those two products no longer occupy the same emotional universe.

The playoff is status.

The bowls are inventory.

That is the problem.

You cannot spend a decade making the playoff the only thing that really matters and then be surprised when the other postseason games feel less important. You cannot de-emphasize bowls, even indirectly, and then use the existence of bowls as an argument against playoff expansion. You cannot tell programs and fans that the CFP is the destination, then tell most of the programs actually investing in football that they should be satisfied with a postseason structure the sport itself has spent years lowering in status.

That is incoherent.

Conference Championship Games Are Next

And the same thing is now happening with conference championship games.

For a long time, conference title games mattered because conferences mattered in a more coherent way. They also mattered because they often served as de facto playoff games. Win the SEC, win the Big Ten, win the Big 12, win the ACC, win the Pac-12, and you had either a real national title path or at least a major bowl destination that could define the season.

Conference title games were connected to both identity and access.

But conference identity has been weakened by realignment, and access has been redefined by the playoff. The bigger and more nationalized the conferences become, the stranger the conference championship game becomes. In a 16-team SEC or an 18-team Big Ten, what exactly is the conference title game? It is still valuable. It still has prestige. It still has television value. But it is not the same kind of regional culmination it used to be.

And under an expanded playoff, its function gets even more complicated.

The CFP changed the 12-team playoff’s seeding policy for the 2025-26 season so that the five highest-ranked conference champions still get guaranteed access, but the top four byes are no longer reserved for the four highest-ranked conference champions. Instead, the bracket is seeded directly according to the selection committee’s final rankings, with the four highest-ranked teams receiving byes.

That change is revealing.

It tells you that even the sport’s power brokers understand there is tension between conference-championship status and overall playoff seeding. Winning a conference still matters, but it is no longer the clean organizing principle of the postseason.

The playoff is the organizing principle now.

Once that happens, conference title games become vulnerable.

That does not mean they are worthless. It does not mean fans should not care about them. It does not mean winning a league should stop being celebrated. But it does mean the sport has already started moving away from a world where the conference title game is the final gatekeeper.

The 24-Team Push Goes Public

If a 24-team playoff happens, this becomes even more obvious.

Recent reporting around 24-team playoff discussions makes clear that conference championship games are part of the tradeoff. CBS reported in January 2026 that the Big Ten preferred a 24-team field and was willing to temporarily accept 16 if the sport committed to 24 within three years, partly to give conferences time to unwind conference championship games tied up in media-rights agreements. CBS also reported that the belief behind that model was that power conferences would eliminate their conference championship games.

That is not a small detail.

That is the sport saying the quiet part out loud.

If the playoff is the main event, then the calendar will eventually bend around the playoff. If the playoff needs more space, conference title games become negotiable. If the playoff can generate enough inventory and revenue, the old championship-game weekend can be repurposed.

That is not because fans suddenly stopped caring about conference titles.

It is because the sport’s media economy is telling us what the hierarchy is.

The CFP is first.

Everything else is downstream.

The American Football Coaches Association has also been tied to a 24-team push that would do away with conference championship games, end the season earlier in January, and protect Army-Navy’s exclusive window. That does not mean the AFCA model will happen. It does mean the sport is openly discussing the tradeoff.

That is exactly why this debate cannot be separated from media incentives.

ESPN helped build the playoff into the sport’s premium postseason product. ESPN owns the most valuable rights package in the sport. ESPN has a direct interest in what the playoff becomes, how many games it includes, how the calendar is structured, and what inventory gets protected or sacrificed.

CBS reported this week that ACC coaches and athletic directors voiced unanimous support for a 24-team model, that Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said his league likes 24 subject to the economics, and that ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said ESPN has been “pretty clear” that it would prefer the CFP to stay at 12 teams or expand no higher than 16.

So when people argue that playoff expansion would devalue bowls or conference title games, my response is pretty simple:

That already happened.

The rightsholder-era playoff system already devalued bowls. The expansion-era playoff system is already devaluing conference title games. The only question now is whether we are going to build a postseason format that honestly reflects the hierarchy the sport has created.

Because pretending the old system still exists does not bring it back.

You cannot go back to a world where dozens of bowl destinations automatically mean what they used to mean just because you want them to. You cannot go back to a world where every conference championship game feels like a national semifinal if the playoff field is larger and the loser may still get in. You cannot go back to a world where fans define success through bowl destinations after spending years telling them the playoff is the destination.

The sport made the playoff king.

Now the playoff has to carry the responsibilities of being king.

That means giving the sport enough access to keep people engaged.

NIL, Revenue Sharing, and a Bigger Investment Class

This is why the argument for a larger playoff is not really about charity. It is not about letting everyone in. It is not about pretending the 24th team is the same as the No. 1 team. It is about aligning the postseason with the sport’s new incentive structure.

College football is moving toward a world where more programs are spending real money to build football rosters. The House settlement permits schools to share revenue directly with athletes up to an annual cap of $20.5 million in 2025-26, with that cap expected to increase over time. I expect we will have the upper third, perhaps as much as the upper half of the P4 spending $30M+ on their rosters come 2027.

That changes the size of the serious investment class.

Before NIL, revenue sharing, and the modern roster economy, there were programs that had money and ambition but could not, or would not, play the same game as schools willing to operate in the shadows. There were schools that were not going to do the technically impermissible recruiting stuff at the same level as others. That did not mean the old system was clean. It obviously was not. But it did create barriers.

Now, more of the player-acquisition market is out in the open.

It is still messy. It is still uneven. It is still full of problems. But more schools can now look at donors and say, plainly: this is what it costs to compete. This is what it costs to keep our roster together. This is what it costs to add talent. This is what it costs to build a real football operation.

That is a massive change.

More programs can now try. More programs can now justify trying. More programs can now tell their fan bases, with at least some credibility, that they are not permanently locked out of the national conversation.

The sport should want that.

College football should want more teams trying. It should want more fan bases engaged. It should want more donors invested. It should want more meaningful games in more places. It should want more programs believing that the path to relevance is hard but not impossible.

But if the playoff remains too small relative to the number of teams making serious investments, then the sport risks creating the opposite feeling.

It risks creating apathy.

The Risk Isn’t Anger. It’s Apathy.

Apathy is the right word here. Not anger. Not outrage. Not even frustration.

Apathy.

Apathy is what happens when people start to believe the effort is disconnected from the reward. It is the feeling of, “No matter what we do, it probably is not going to be enough.” It is the feeling that your school can spend more money, hire better staff, recruit better players, retain more talent, win more games, and still finish outside the only postseason tier that really matters.

That is not healthy.

If we eventually have something like 40 programs spending serious money to build football rosters, and only 12 can make the playoff, then 70 percent of the programs actually trying are failing to reach even the lowest major goal.

Not winning the national title.

Not making the final.

Not making the semifinal.

Just getting into the field.

Again, sports are supposed to have losers. Nobody is arguing that every team trying to compete should be rewarded with a playoff spot. Failure is part of the point.

But there is a difference between failure that feels competitive and failure that starts to feel structurally inevitable.

If a program goes 8-4, loses the wrong games, and misses the playoff, fine. That is sports. If a team is mediocre, it should not get in just because it spent money. But if a program has one of its better seasons, plays a real schedule, wins important games, and still feels like it had almost no margin for error because the field is too narrow, then eventually people notice.

Fans notice. Donors notice. Athletic directors notice. Coaches notice. Players notice.

And then the sport wonders why people stop caring as much.

The Case for 24

That is why the 24-team playoff argument makes sense to me.

Not because 24 is some magic number. Not because the 24th team is usually going to win the national title. Not because the sport needs to copy college basketball. And not because every ambitious program deserves access.

The argument for 24 is that it creates a more reasonable relationship between the number of programs seriously investing and the number of programs that can reach the postseason destination that now matters most.

If 40 or so teams are really trying, 24 playoff spots still leaves plenty of teams out. It is not charity. It is not automatic access. It does not remove failure from the sport. It simply means that a little more than half of the serious investment class can define its season as reaching the thing it was trying to reach.

That feels much healthier than a system where the majority of serious programs are told to spend like contenders while knowing the baseline goal is only available to a small fraction of them.

Whose Regular Season Are We Talking About?

And this is where the regular-season argument comes back in.

People say a bigger playoff will kill the regular season.

But whose regular season are we talking about?

For the top six or eight teams, the regular season already matters. It will always matter. Georgia’s regular season matters. Ohio State’s regular season matters. Alabama’s regular season matters. Texas, Michigan, Oregon, Notre Dame, LSU, Penn State, and the other true national brands are almost always going to be connected to the playoff conversation if they are good.

But the sport is bigger than that.

For a much larger group of teams, the current system can make the regular season feel like it ends too early. One early loss may not technically eliminate you, but it can make the path extremely narrow. Two losses can turn the rest of the season into a consolation exercise unless you have the right brand, the right schedule, or a conference-title path that gives you a lifeline.

That does not make the regular season matter more.

It makes fewer regular seasons matter for fewer people.

A larger playoff changes that.

A 24-team field would keep more teams alive in October and November. It would make a game between two 8-2 teams feel nationally relevant. It would make a 9-2 rivalry game matter not just locally, but in the playoff picture. It would make the difference between finishing 10th, 16th, 22nd, and 27th important. It would create stakes around hosting, seeding, matchups, byes, and avoiding difficult paths.

That is not killing the regular season.

That is giving the regular season more oxygen.

Right now, the sport protects the enormous stakes of a small number of games at the very top. That is valuable. But it comes at a cost. A lot of other games become less meaningful because the teams involved are already functionally outside the only race the sport has decided really matters.

Expansion would create more games that matter to the fans of those teams and to the national landscape.

Think about what that means in practice. More fan bases would spend November scoreboard-watching. More conference games would have playoff implications. More rivalry games would carry national stakes. More ranked matchups outside the top 10 would actually affect the postseason. More neutral fans would have a reason to watch teams beyond the tiny handful at the very top.

That is good for the sport.

The regular season is not special simply because teams can be eliminated quickly. The regular season is special because the games feel connected to something larger. If expansion makes more games feel connected to something larger, then it is strengthening the regular season, not weakening it.

The Scheduling Problem

And then there is the scheduling piece, which may be the most underrated part of the whole debate.

College football has a scheduling problem because the incentives are bad.

Everyone says they want better games. Fans want better games. Television wants better games. Players want to play in better games. Recruits notice better games. Even coaches and athletic directors, in theory, want their programs on bigger stages.

But the system often punishes risk too harshly.

If playoff access is scarce and the process is too record-driven, then one additional loss can be devastating. And if one additional loss can be devastating, the rational move is obvious: schedule fewer games you might lose.

That is how you get cowardly scheduling.

That is how you get major programs using multiple weeks of the season on opponents their fans do not want to watch. That is how you get teams protecting their records instead of testing themselves. That is how you get a sport that claims every regular-season game matters while allowing contenders to fill a quarter of the schedule with games that barely feel like real events.

The scheduling data reflects the incentive problem. In 2025, CBS reported that only six Power Four schools were scheduled to play 10 Power Four games and zero FCS games: Colorado, Michigan, Stanford, UCLA, USC, and Wisconsin.

A larger playoff can help fix that.

If more teams get in, then an extra loss — especially a loss to another good team — does not have to be fatal. That matters. A team should not be punished more harshly for playing a real opponent and losing a competitive game than another team is rewarded for avoiding danger entirely.

The sport should want ambitious scheduling. It should want September games between brands. It should want power-conference teams playing other power-conference teams. It should want intersectional matchups. It should want games that people talk about all week and remember after the season.

But you cannot get there by begging programs to be brave.

You get there by changing the incentives.

You make strength of schedule matter. You make quality wins matter. You make it clear that a good loss against a real opponent is not the same as a bad loss. You make it clear that playing a serious schedule gives you more ways to impress the committee, not just more ways to eliminate yourself.

That is the key.

Expansion alone is not enough. A 24-team playoff should not simply become a reward for teams that avoided danger and stacked empty wins. The selection process has to value résumé quality. It has to reward teams for playing and beating good opponents. It has to distinguish between 10-2 against a real schedule and 11-1 against a padded one.

But if the committee does that, expansion could make the regular season much better.

It would reduce the incentive to hide. It would give programs more room to schedule aggressively. It would make more early-season games attractive. It would create a system where losing a great game is not treated like a season-ending event.

That is the version of college football people actually want.

People do not want to spend September watching serious contenders play games with 38-point spreads. They do not want to watch three weeks of buy games and then be lectured about how sacred the regular season is. They do not want programs to manipulate the schedule, avoid risk, and then claim superiority because they protected the loss column.

The regular season is not sacred because a team can buy an easy win in Week 2.

The regular season is sacred when the games matter.

A bigger playoff creates more ways for more games to matter.

The Playoff Already Shapes the Regular Season

The anti-expansion argument often imagines the regular season as this perfect, fragile thing that must be protected from the playoff. But the regular season is already being shaped by the playoff. The playoff already determines how teams schedule, how fans judge seasons, how media frames games, how coaches talk about goals, and how athletic departments justify spending.

The question is not whether the playoff will affect the regular season.

It already does.

The question is whether those effects are good.

Right now, too many of the effects are defensive. Protect the record. Avoid the extra loss. Do not schedule too aggressively. Hope the committee values your clean résumé. Get to November with as few blemishes as possible.

That is rational, but it is not especially good for the sport.

A larger field could create more offensive incentives. Play good teams. Build a real résumé. Give yourself chances for quality wins. Trust that one additional loss will not erase the value of the rest of the season. Stay alive deep into November. Give your fans meaningful games.

That is a better version of college football.

The Concept Is Sound, But the Design Has to Be Right

This does not mean the playoff should ignore excellence. The top teams should still be rewarded heavily. There should be real value in being elite over 12 games. Seeding should matter. Home-field advantage should matter. Byes should matter if the format includes them. Conference championships should matter. The difference between being No. 3 and No. 18 should be enormous.

Expansion should not flatten the regular season.

It should widen it.

That distinction is important.

A badly designed 24-team playoff could create problems. If it treated every qualifier the same, it would be a mistake. If it rewarded mediocre teams with weak schedules, it would be a mistake. If it killed conference title games without replacing that weekend with something better, it would be a mistake. If it added too many games without accounting for player health and the calendar, it would be a mistake.

But those are design problems.

They are not arguments against the concept.

The concept is sound: the postseason should match the sport’s incentive structure.

And the sport’s incentive structure has changed dramatically.

The old bowl system gave lots of teams meaningful postseason goals. The modern playoff era has centralized meaning around one event. The old recruiting economy limited how many programs could realistically compete for certain players. The modern NIL and revenue-sharing economy gives more programs a legal, organized way to enter the market. The old conference structure preserved more regional identity. The modern conference structure is increasingly national and television-driven.

Everything about the sport is being reorganized around money, competition, access, and media inventory.

So why would the playoff format remain artificially narrow?

If the sport wants more teams to try, it has to make trying rational. If it wants more teams to spend, it has to give them a meaningful target. If it wants more fan bases engaged, it has to give them a postseason race they can actually enter. If it wants better regular-season games, it has to stop punishing teams so harshly for playing them.

A 12-team playoff may be better than a four-team playoff.

That does not mean it is the right long-term endpoint.

Twelve still creates a narrow field relative to the number of programs that may soon be investing like playoff contenders. Twelve still encourages record protection. Twelve still leaves a lot of serious teams outside the only postseason tier that matters. Twelve still risks creating a sport where the playoff race feels national for the top programs but much less accessible for the next tier.

A 24-team playoff would not solve everything. It would not create perfect parity. It would not make all conferences equal. It would not erase brand bias. It would not stop arguments about the committee. It would not prevent bad losses from mattering. It would not make the 24th team as good as the first.

But it would make the sport’s central goal more realistically accessible to the programs being asked to chase it.

That matters.

College Football Runs on Hope

College football runs on hope. Not fairness, exactly. Not equality.

Hope.

Fans do not need to be promised a championship. They do not even need to be promised a playoff spot. But they do need to believe there is a real path. They need to believe that if their team invests well, recruits well, develops well, schedules well, and wins enough games, the season can lead somewhere meaningful.

Hope is what keeps fans engaged after one loss. Hope is what gets donors to keep contributing. Hope is what makes season tickets feel worth it. Hope is what makes November games matter. Hope is what allows a coach to sell a vision that is bigger than, “Maybe we can go 8-4 and play in a bowl half our roster might skip.”

If the playoff is too small, that hope gets concentrated among too few programs.

That is not good for the sport.

The danger is not that Alabama or Ohio State or Georgia fans will stop believing. They will be fine. The danger is that the next tier of programs — the ones with money, ambition, fan support, and occasional windows to be very good — start to feel like the chase is not worth it.

Those programs are crucial.

They are the difference between a truly national sport and a superleague in disguise. They are the difference between a sport where dozens of fan bases care about the playoff race and one where everyone else is watching the same brands fight over the same spots. They are the difference between a broad regular season and a narrow one.

A bigger playoff keeps that middle engaged.

Aligning the Postseason With the Sport

And again, this is not about lowering standards. It is about aligning standards with reality.

If 40 programs are spending like they want to make the playoff, a 24-team field still tells 16 of them no (and probably more than that because there will be some guaranteed G5 spots). It still forces teams to win. It still creates heartbreak. It still produces bubble arguments. It still rewards the best teams.

It just does not turn the basic act of making the field into something so scarce that most serious programs are likely to fail before they even get to the higher goals.

The national championship should be extremely hard to win. Making the playoff should be hard too. But it should not be so narrow that the sport accidentally discourages the very ambition it claims to want.

That is the heart of the issue.

Do we want more programs trying or fewer?

If we want fewer, then keep the field small. Preserve scarcity at all costs. Let the sport continue sorting itself into a handful of annual playoff hopefuls and a much larger group that spends a lot of money to chase a goal it probably cannot reach.

But if we want more programs trying, more donors engaged, more fans invested, more games that matter, and better scheduling, then the playoff has to grow with the sport.

A 24-team playoff is not some radical act of charity.

It is a recognition that college football’s postseason needs to reflect college football’s economy.

The sport has spent years telling everyone the playoff is what matters. It has spent years de-emphasizing bowls. It has created a player market where more teams can compete above board. It has pushed programs to spend more, organize better, and chase national relevance more aggressively.

Now the postseason has to catch up.

The Responsibility Belongs With the Builders

And the blame here should not be shifted entirely onto players, coaches, or fans. A lot of the responsibility belongs with the people and companies that built the current hierarchy.

The rights holder wanted the playoff to be massive.

It is massive.

The rights holder wanted the playoff to be the center of college football’s postseason.

It is the center.

The rights holder helped create a sport where the CFP is the prestige product and everything else is secondary. That worked. But there are consequences.

One consequence is that bowls no longer mean what they used to mean.

Another consequence is that conference title games are no longer as structurally central as they used to be.

Another consequence is that programs now judge themselves by playoff access.

Another consequence is that a 12-team field may not be large enough for the number of teams now being encouraged to invest like contenders.

That is the world ESPN and the CFP helped create.

So when people say a bigger playoff would devalue the regular season, bowls, or conference championships, I think they have the order backward.

Those things have already been devalued by the playoff-centric structure of the sport.

The question is whether expansion can restore meaning to more of the season by creating a broader, more rational path into the event everyone has already agreed matters most.

Bad Incentives Kill the Regular Season, Not Bigger Fields

The current system does not protect the regular season as much as its defenders think. It protects the fear of losing. That fear leads to soft scheduling, fewer meaningful games for too many fan bases, and a national race that becomes too narrow too early.

A larger playoff would not kill the regular season.

Bad incentives kill the regular season.

A bigger, better-designed playoff could do the opposite. It could make more games matter. It could keep more teams alive. It could make more fan bases care. It could reward teams for playing real opponents instead of hiding from them. It could give the sport more of what it claims to value: big games, high stakes, national relevance, and competitive ambition.

That is the case for expansion.

Not that everyone deserves a spot.

Not that losses should not matter.

Not that the regular season should be diluted.

The case is that college football has changed, and the playoff should reflect the sport as it now exists.

If more teams are going to be encouraged to spend like contenders, they need a real path to the postseason destination that defines contention. If fans are going to be asked to care all season, more of their teams need to remain connected to something that matters. And if programs are going to be asked to schedule better games, they need a system that does not punish them for taking the risk.

A 24-team playoff would not make the regular season meaningless.

It would make more of the regular season matter.