This week’s committee bullshit
Indiana was dropped five places – and was kicked out of a “first-round bye” position – by taking a bye week. Meanwhile, Wake Forest moved up three places by drubbing a hapless patsy 77-0, a tough defeat for Merrimack even by the standards of the Confederate navy. So I guess Indiana could have made it to #1 if they had only beaten Fordham 99-0 instead of resting their players. The volatility of the committee’s judgments is disturbing. Indiana was considered the fourth-best team in America seven days earlier. It did absolutely nothing wrong, and suddenly five teams were deemed superior.
It becomes increasingly apparent that somebody representing Kentucky has given somebody on the committee a truly superlative blow job. Somehow a team outside the SP+ top 40 is in a position to enter the playoffs. In fact, if the season ended today, Kentucky would get the 11th seed. I’m not convinced that they are among the top 11 teams in their own conference. It’s close. By Sagarin’s ratings, Kentucky is only the tenth-best team in the SEC, while SP+ places it ninth, They already have a pair of 28-point losses in conference play.
The new 24-team College Football Playoff
On November 9, 2026, the CFP officially approved doubling the playoff field from 12 to 24 teams, beginning with the 2027 season. The current 12-team format remains in place for 2026.
Here are the principal changes for next year:
1. The Power Four championship games are reportedly being eliminated. Conference champions will instead be determined through regular-season standings or other procedures established by each conference. (The CFP’s official announcement leaves the final decision about championship games to the individual conferences.)
2. 24 teams qualify: Automatic bids go to the champions of the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC, plus the highest-ranked team from the six other FBS conferences. The remaining 19 places are at-large selections determined by the CFP committee. This basically means that the top 24 teams, as rated by the committee, will also be seeds 1-24 because (a) It is unlikely the the best team in the standings of a Power Four conference will be outside the top 24; (2) the committee controls the rankings, so all they have to do is reserve the #24 slot for a Group of Six team, and there will be no teams displaced.
2. Eight teams receive byes: Seeds 1–8 skip the opening round and host second-round games on their home fields. These eight teams could, in theory all be from the same conference. No spots are automatic.
3. Sixteen campus playoff games: Seeds 9–16 host seeds 17–24 in the first round. The eight winners advance to play seeds 1–8, also on campus.
4. The bowl games survive: The quarterfinals and semifinals remain at the six traditional CFP bowl sites. The national championship remains a separate game.
5. The calendar moves forward: The playoffs begin in early December, with the first championship under the expanded format scheduled for January 24, 2028, in New Orleans.
6. Notre Dame is no longer guaranteed a spot if in the top24. Under the existing rules, Notre Dame can’t be displaced if it finished in the top 12. Under the new rules, it can be displaced. For example, if Notre Dame is ranked #24 and James Madison is the top Group of Six team at #25, Madison would get the 24th seed. Practically speaking, this will never happen since the committee controls the rankings and there is no objective standard, so if they want Notre Dame in the post-season, they can eliminate the controversy by ranking Madison #24 and Notre Dame #23, and pushing some other club out.
There’s also a significant scheduling requirement: Power Four teams will be expected to play at least 10 qualifying games against conference opponents, other Power Four schools or Notre Dame. The committee will give no additional credit for beating more than one FCS opponent. That last provision seems particularly relevant after Wake Forest’s 77–0 destruction of Merrimack!
(Scoop’s note on “No additional credit for beating more than one FCS opponent.” Really? Why should they get any credit for beating the first one? The committee just needs to grow a pair and insist that FBS teams play only FBS opponents. There are plenty of those available for jobber homecoming games. Kent State, Akron, UL Monroe and Old Dominion are available to cash your checks. Unless you’re afraid of losing to them, as Notre Dame did to NIU in 2024.)
The playoff becomes more like the NCAA basketball tournament. The biggest practical change: A team ranked #24 can now compete for the national championship, but it would have to win five consecutive playoff games!
The college football I grew up with – PAC-10, Big Ten, Southwestern Conference, a big deal when the Fiesta Bowl got Penn State and Miami together – is dead dead D-E-A-D.
I’m an Ohio State fan, but they’re lucky to be 20.
Unlike college football, in college basketball you actually have a significant body of evidence of teams playing outside of their insular shell during the season to extrapolate things. Last night we had games between Illinois-Texas Tech, MSU-Duke, and Kansas-Kentucky.
You literally will likely only have ONE meaningful game outside the conference to extrapolate data from to compare strength in college football, happening in mid summer with the middle of the playoff in winter. Not only that, the conferences are so big, they don’t even play half their league.
So you get what we see with those rankings. Multiple teams between the three metrics have a 10 position gap between any two metrics on those lines.
Personally I think the rankings need to end and an officially used metric like the NET rankings need to come into play like college basketball, with a selection committee making the decision at the end of the season. Of course, that would mean another hype program less for ESPN during the week to talk about and make money on.