Will 12-Team CFP Format Make National Championship Game More Competitive? 🏈
Nobody knows anything but it's always fun to make predictions!
I was texting with my buddy Tyler last night during the early stages of the College Football Playoff (CFP) National Championship. I offhandedly said that the most disappointing part of the BCS/CFP era is that the title game is a blowout more often than not.
It was just a hot take—a gut feeling. I remembered last year’s snoozer and Alabama’s dominance of Notre Dame in 2012. But were there really that many blowouts over twenty-five years?
I became intrigued and started digging into past scores. To my amazement, this is a concerning trend—one that I haven’t seen or heard any local or national media member speak about.
Before we get into what the new format will do, let’s take a look at the data:
Between 1998 and 2024, there have been eighteen instances of a blowout win (10+ points), equaling 72% of games played. This also includes a streak of six blowout title games in a row.
During the same period, the Super Bowl has had only 44% of their matchups turn into blowouts, and that includes New England’s 13-3 win over Los Angeles in 2019.
Why make the comparison? The obvious reason is that they are the same sport, albeit at different levels of competition. The main difference lies in the number of postseason rounds an NFL team must win to capture a Super Bowl versus how many an NCAA team needs to win the CFP title.
In the NFL, a team needs to win four rounds of games (three if you receive the #1 seed and a first-round bye, which goes to two total teams) while the BCS championship was a winner-take-all, followed by the two-round CFP format in play since 2014.
Beginning this season, teams will need to win four rounds of games (again, only three if you receive a first-round bye, which goes to four total teams).
So now that the two levels are more similar in their postseason setup, does that mean there will be more competitive CFP National Championship games?
There are still many differences to consider between the NFL and NCAA. For instance, the NFL has a more controlled schedule. There are 32 teams split across two conferences and six divisions. At the FBS NCAA level—Division 1 Football— ten conferences total 133 teams. The NFL has a 17-game regular season schedule, while college football employs a 12-game regular season.
At neither level does one team play everybody, but you play most teams in the NFL. What does that matter? Most significantly it means that comparison among each team is much easier done. Still not foolproof, but more logical. In college, you play a tenth of the teams, which makes evaluating who is “the best” insane to some degree.
Sure, you can use the eye test and see which team is bigger, faster, and stronger. And the scoreboard unequivocally does not lie. But I can’t help but think that a big reason for the lopsided championship scores is that the wrong teams make it to the final game.
Now you can say, “Colin, that’s a load of crap—you play who you play and that’s how it’s always been.” True, I say to you. True. But there was also less D1 competition in years past. There were 119 D1 teams as far back as 1970 but you could more easily know who was good and who wasn’t back then. Recruiting elite talent was for the blue bloods only, the other teams only existed to play a game on the schedule. Nebraska, Oklahoma, Notre Dame, Penn State, Miami, and Alabama dominated the landscape until the inception of the BCS. That’s six teams accounting for 68% of championships won over 28 years.
Fast forward through the last 26 years and those same blue bloods only account for 31% of the championships—largely thanks to Alabama winning six titles. Mini “blue blood” programs emerged over that span, including Clemson, Flordia, LSU, Florida State, and most recently, Georgia, with LSU leading the way having won three championships.
The difference between the two eras is the consistency of the blue blood programs. The six teams pre-BCS/CFP eras were almost always in the national title conversation. Maybe that’s because there wasn’t a system in place. But I think it has more to do with the dominance those programs had due to geographical and recruiting advantages. The latest era—due to various changes—has seen little consistency, with only Alabama and Georgia claiming back-to-back titles one time each.
So the question remains: can the upcoming 12-team CFP format help the sport identify the “best” teams and can those teams make it to the final game on a more consistent basis? This is a different question than can the same 65% of teams win the title each season. This is a question of whether or not the right teams make it to the CFP Championships so that we see a more competitive title match.
My gut tells me yes. According to the NCAA official website, the new 12-team CFP field will include the six highest-ranked conference champions, which will receive automatic bids. The top four teams will receive a first-round bye to the quarterfinals. Then the six highest-ranked teams remaining will round out the 12-team format.
That means the six highest seeds will split between the Power 5 and Group of 5 conferences, plus the three Independent schools (which include Notre Dame 🫠). Had the current format been in place for the 2023 regular season, here’s what the first-round matchups would have looked like:
No. 12 Liberty at No. 5 Florida State
No. 11 Ole Miss at No. 6 Georgia
No. 10 Penn State at No. 7 Ohio State
No. 9 Missouri at No. 8 Oregon
The same four teams that qualified for this season’s final version of the four-team format—Michigan, Washington, Texas, and Alabama—would have received first-round byes.
Now, I bolded Georgia above for a specific reason. While a lot of folks (myself included) hope expended playoffs can help fringe teams like Penn State or Ole Miss get a shot, I believe it’ll do more to give teams like Georgia, who suffered the most untimely of untimely losses to miss out on the playoff in 2024, an opportunity to reaffirm their standing in the sport and compete for a title. In no other sport could you win 29 games in a row, including two national championships, and be left out of the playoffs because you lost a conference championship game. It’s ridiculous. And it doesn’t even cover the Flordia State debacle.
Anyway, I’m playing Armchair Expert here, but I could totally envision Georgia winning three games in a row to have a chance to compete for a championship. After all, they had just run off 29 DUBS IN A ROW! Armchair Colin also believes that Georgia would have blown out Washington but they would have gone toe-to-toe with Michigan — a physical but super-well-coached team, disciplined, and protects the ball as well as any we’ve seen in recent history.
Would the format have rolled out that way so that Georgia could have played Michigan for the title? I don’t know. But what I’m confident about is that a 12-team format will actually bring clarity to the wild college football regular seasons. In most seasons, the best teams will rise close enough to the top to be included in the playoff, and we’ll get a chance to see a team like Georgia seek revenge against its first-round opponent. How scary would that have been for Ole Miss?
I know there is no complete and fair way to crown a championship in college football but I sincerely hope the new CFP format allows us to see more competitive games between the actual best teams as the games dwindle and get more significant in importance.