College football is expanding to a 12-team College Football Playoff for the 2024 and 2025 seasons.
After decades upon decades of the polls deciding the national champion (1936-1991) and early futile attempts at creating a national championship game like the Bowl Coalition (1992-1994) and the Bowl Alliance (1995-1997), the Bowl Championship Series was born.
The BCS lasted from 1998 to 2013, when the College Football Playoff was introduced and the four-team CFP model stuck for a decade (2014-2023).
Now, the CFP will feature twelve teams with five automatic bids for the five highest-ranked conference champions.
The top four of those champions will get a first-round bye (likely the SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 champs).
The seven at-large teams and the fifth conference champion (probably coming from the Group of Five) will be seeded 5 through 12, rounding out the field with the first round of games.
It’s yet to be seen how the Playoff Committee will balance teams with better records coming from easier conferences like the Big 12 and ACC against teams with worse records coming from harder conferences like the Big 10 and SEC.
One college football analyst, however, believes that the Oklahoma Sooners’ new league will be well-represented come December.
“It’s not apples to apples because you can’t just port Texas or Oklahoma playoff appearances to the SEC because of how the automatic bids work and because we don’t know if those teams would have had a different record playing in a different league, but seven teams that will be in the SEC in 2024 (Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Ole Miss, Missouri, LSU, Oklahoma) finished in the top 13 last season,” Staples said.
