College Football Play-Off firms up future plans
After years of argument, we finally know what’s going on. College Football will have its 12-team play-off, starting in the 2024 season. This gives us one more year of arguing and raging, before we argue and rage about 50 more teams that should have made the 12.
Anyhoo, the six highest-ranked conference champions in the 10 college football conferences will earn a spot, as well as six at-large bids. This means that it’s guaranteed that a Group-Of-Give team (or two, which could happen if the Sun Belt continues its upwards trajectory and the AAC continues to vastly improve) gets in, which is pleasing.
SO WHAT HAPPENS ABOUT THE GAMES?
The Rose, Cotton, Orange, Sugar, Fiesta and Peach Bowls will host quarterfinals and semi-final games, before we hit the National Championship.
While the Top 4 teams will get a bye, there will be games between the others.
First round clashes
The 12th seed will visit the 5th, the 11th will visit the 6th, the 10th will visit the 7th, and the 9th will visit the 8th.
For the quarterfinals:
The 8th/9th winner would then play the No.1 seed.
The 7th/10th winner would play the No.2 seed.
The 6th/11th winner would play the No.3 seed
The 5th/12th winner would play the No.4 seed.
The Natty will be played on January 20nd in Atlanta, where it’s presumed that Georgia and Alabama fans have already reserved tickets.
This year, we would have seen:
- Georgia
- Michigan
- TCU
- USC
- Ohio State
- Alabama
- Tennessee
- Penn State
- Clemson
- Kansas State
- Utah
- Tulane
Georgia head coach gave his usual non-committal answer: ““[I’m] not real sure. You know, I think only time will tell,” Smart said. “I read and see a lot of opinions out there [about] length of games, number of games. But I don’t think we’ll truly know, just like when we went to the four-game model there were a lot of questions involved there, too. It’s not something that I’ve got a huge opinion on right now — especially right now because of what we’re focused on. But you know, in the offseason I’ll think about it a lot more.”
Nick Saban was more vocal: “I am an advocate of having a bigger playoff because if you have a bigger playoff, you have more fan interest. The only fan interest now is in the playoff. If you have a four-team playoff, you’ve got seven or eight teams that still have a chance to get in the playoff, so their fanbase is still excited about what’s going on, and everybody else is disappointed. If you have a 12-team playoff, we’d probably have 20-25 teams that would still have a chance to get in the 12-team playoff. Like we would have a chance to get in the 12-team playoff even though we’ve had a couple disappointing losses. And I think there would be a lot more fan interest on a national basis for a lot more teams. So I’m actually for that.”
Penn State’s head coach James Franklin said that a widened play-off might stop a lot of teams from getting screwed like Penn State did in 2016, when Ohio State – a team that it had beaten – went to the play-off instead of the Nittany Lions. “There’s obviously always the discussion about teams maybe that aren’t Power Five schools that had great years but are left out, or a situation like us where we won the Big Ten championship, arguably top two conferences if not the best conference in all of college football, and be left out. I think it helps resolve and solve some of those issues.”