There was a time, not all that long ago, when the college football regular season felt like the most unforgiving thing in sports. Every Saturday mattered. Every road trip carried danger. Every upset reshaped the national conversation. A loss in September could haunt a team into November. A loss in November could end a dream in real time.
That was part of the beauty of the sport.
College football was never the NFL. It was never supposed to be a professional league with a long runway, expanded access and enough postseason inventory to keep half the sport alive deep into December. It was strange, regional, emotional and wonderfully inefficient. It was built around rivalry games, conference races, arguments, style points, strength of schedule and the knowledge that one bad afternoon could change everything.
Now, as momentum builds toward a possible 24-team College Football Playoff, it feels like another piece of that structure is being traded away. Not because anyone has solved the real problems in college football. Not because the calendar suddenly makes sense. Not because coaches, athletes, schools and fans are operating inside a stable system with logical boundaries.
No, the sport is doing what it has done over and over again.
It is taking the mess it created, adding more games, adding more money and calling that progress.
To be fair, there are parts of the idea that make sense. More playoff games mean more television money. More teams in the field mean more fan bases stay engaged later in the season. A 24-team format would give more programs a tangible path into the national championship race, and the sport has always benefited from allowing hope to breathe outside the same handful of helmets.
There is also an argument that a larger playoff could make some late-season games more meaningful for teams that would otherwise be eliminated from contention. A team sitting at 8-2 or 9-2 would still be playing for positioning. A program outside the SEC and Big Ten might still believe it has a path. Campus playoff games would create incredible atmospheres. From a pure content standpoint, there is a lot to like.
And yes, the money matters.
At a time when schools are dealing with revenue sharing, NIL collectives, ballooning travel costs, coaching salaries, legal uncertainty and expanded athlete compensation, it is not hard to understand why administrators and conference commissioners look at more playoff inventory and see oxygen. Nobody should pretend the old model was some pure, amateur ideal. College football has always been a business. The only difference now is that the sport has stopped pretending otherwise.
But understanding the financial incentive is not the same as believing the structure is good for the sport.
