By Now that it’s all over and the Ohio State Buckeyes are the college football national champions, it can be definitively said: expanding the College Football Playoff worked.
The grand experiment to allow more teams to play for the national championship wasn’t perfect, but it ended up where it was supposed to: a worthy national champion with exciting, close games in the later rounds when the best teams faced one another. It gave us awesome scenes on campuses around the nation, created new legends and showed how a sport so steeped in tradition can evolve when faced with new demands from its fans and business partners.
Here are four reasons why the new version of the College Football Playoff worked – and the areas that can still be fixed.
Before the games kicked off in December, much of the focus was put on the inclusion of Southern Methodist University (SMU) and Indiana University – two teams that won a bunch of games but didn’t have the brand recognition of schools like Alabama, South Carolina and Ole Miss.
Here’s what else those teams had that SMU and Indiana didn’t: three losses.
The Hoosiers lost only once in the regular season – to eventual national champion Ohio State. The Mustangs had lost twice, once to Brigham Young University and again in the ACC championship game to Clemson.
In the first year of the expanded, 12-team playoff, could the committee really leave out a major conference team with 11 wins and punish another one for playing for a conference championship while other teams sat at home? Warde Manuel, the University of Michigan athletic director who served as chair of the committee, said they could not.
Two weeks after that selection, both SMU and Indiana were blown away by Penn State and Notre Dame, respectively. Fans of the SEC schools left watching from home were livid.
But here’s the thing: Tennessee, whose inclusion no one had a qualm with, got snuffed out by Ohio State. Oregon, the Big Ten champions who were undefeated and the top-ranked team, got demolished by Ohio State. Notre Dame easily handled Georgia, which won the SEC. Penn State smashed Boise State in the quarterfinals. The lesson? Sometimes, blowouts just happen.
In the final six games of the tournament, the College Football Playoff delivered four classics: Texas-Arizona State in the Peach Bowl went to double overtime, Penn State-Notre Dame was decided on the final play, Ohio State-Texas came down to a remarkable fumble return for a touchdown with two minutes remaining and the final between Notre Dame and Ohio State went right down to the wire after the Fighting Irish’s second-half comeback.
Oh, and of those three teams that made the most noise about not being included, only Mississippi won their bowl game. Alabama was beaten by a truly mediocre Michigan team in the ReliaQuest Bowl and South Carolina lost to Illinois in the Citrus Bowl.
Ohio State and Notre Dame are proof that expanding the field was a good idea
Listen, sometimes weird things happen in college football.
Think back to September: Northern Illinois – which finished 8-5, 4-4 in the MAC – beat that Fighting Irish team that just pushed the national champs to the limit on Monday. Ohio State in November simply wilted under the pressure of beating their archrival and, as the cliché says, the records can be thrown out when OSU and Michigan go up against each other.
Both of those losses would have eliminated the Irish and Buckeyes from competing in the playoffs in the past. Instead, they got a chance to regroup and show their class during their stellar playoff runs.
College football has long had zero margin for error when it comes to competing for the sport’s top prize. But sometimes that kept the best teams from playing in the biggest games because of one fluky regular season loss – something that does not exist in literally any other American sport.
Allowing room for redemption made for a storyline-rich national championship game and an exciting contest. The things that allowed Notre Dame to make its second half charge and fight back against the onslaught of Ohio State offense – toughness, resiliency and talent – are the traits that define football to begin with.
From the moment the ball was kicked at Notre Dame Stadium, it was clear that bringing the opening round of the playoffs to on-campus venues was a master stroke.
The electric atmosphere belied the freezing temperatures and the game between the Fighting Irish and Hoosiers felt like a massive deal. The next day in Happy Valley, Austin and Columbus echoed that vibe – loud, wonderful college football atmospheres.
In chilly University Park, Pennsylvania, the tailgating scene was expansive and rocking hours before game time despite the snow on the ground and the freeze in the air. Once the 107,000 or so Penn State fans got into Beaver Stadium, the press box was literally shaking with the noise and vibrations of fans jumping following big plays in the rout of SMU.
Similar scenes took place in Austin, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio, though the vibe at Ohio Stadium was decidedly different than might be expected. After a loss to Michigan on November 30, Buckeye fans were feeling down and out as Tennessee Volunteer fans invaded The Horseshoe. Tens of thousands of orange-clad fans were mixed in with the scarlet and gray, an unprecedented scene in a place that is usually one of the most difficult places to play in college football.
It was unique, it was special, it was fun. And that’s what college football is all about.
Demand was high – and not just for the CFP
Shifting away from vibes and toward the numbers, it’s just clear that there was an appetite for more meaningful college football games.
In the first round, the opening game of Notre Dame-Indiana drew in 13.4 million viewers. Ohio State-Tennessee drew in 14.3 million. The numbers were smaller for the earlier games. Penn State-SMU and Clemson-Texas contests were played directly against NFL regular season games as the pros started to play on Saturday following the end of the college football regular season. The overall average was 10.6 million viewers per game for the first round of games.
For the quarterfinals, the numbers only went up: 21.1 million for the Ohio State-Oregon Rose Bowl tilt, 17.3 million for the classic Peach Bowl between Arizona State and Texas, 15.8 million for an emotional Sugar Bowl between Georgia and Notre Dame and 13.9 million for the Fiesta Bowl clash between Penn State and Boise State. The semifinals were actually down from the 2024 edition, but 17.8 million people watched Penn State-Notre Dame and 20.6 million watched Ohio State-Texas.
In an age of television and streaming choices, a fragmented media market and audiences increasingly turning to their phones instead of live TV, those are big figures. Ratings information for the final hasn’t dropped yet, but big numbers are expected again
On the in-person side, getting into any of the games was expensive, none more so than the final between Notre Dame and Ohio State. At one point on game day, it cost $6,000 for a pair of tickets just to get into the door to watch the battle between college football blue bloods.
One of the chief critiques of the expanded playoff field was that it would dilute the meaning of the rest of college football’s bowl season. ESPN reported that this wasn’t the case. The network, which aired many of the bowl games, reported bowl season saw a 14% increase in viewership year-on-year.
All that being said, there are some fixes that need to be made – some that should be easy and others that are far trickier.
One of the easy ones should be eliminating the first-round bye for the four highest-ranked conference champions. Following the model of the NCAA basketball tournament, in which teams are seeded by how the committee views their talent and resumé, would make more sense going forward than rewarding teams that won their conference but might be less talented than a team that didn’t.
In this edition of the playoff, that would have likely meant Texas and Penn State got a bye while Arizona State and Boise State played in the first round. Traditionalists would likely argue that winning the conference should be rewarded but the goal is to find the best team in the country, and the playoff should be set up to make teams earn their way into the biggest game of the year.
One other glaring flaw that became apparent this week is the elongated schedule, which put the national championship on the same day as a presidential inauguration and a day after the NFL playoffs’ divisional round wrapped up. While demand for tickets was high in Atlanta, some fans complained that the hype around the game was lacking in comparison to previous years.
This complaint is much harder to resolve. Traditions are what make college football go around. The Saturday after the conference championship weekends is traditionally the time for the Army-Navy game, the annual end-of-regular-season contest between the two service academies. And then there’s the issue of the multitude of bowl games and January 1, which has long been the big day for college football bowl games. Preserving the profile of that day and those games is a big priority for movers and shakers in the college football world.
The question facing College Football Playoff officials after this year could be the same one they’ve been balancing for a decade: how to best consider college football’s traditions, provide the best product for fans, and also allow the cream of the sport’s crop to rise to the top.
