an 8 team playoff was never in consideration. PAC10 pitched it, an everyone else said no.

it did not add any games to the 4 team playoff, so no new real TV money. (NY6 plus championship = 7 games; 8 team playoff = 7 games)

Zackdh9 said:

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No weird format with byes, top seed gets easier path. 3 simple weeks of single elimination football.

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^^^^This x10

Top 8 computed from AP poll, Coaches poll, and Committee

Quarters and Semis on campus of higher ranked teams

Championship game at neutral site (rotate between Rose, Fiesta, Cotton, Sugar, Orange, and Peach)

Bowl games for everyone else outside the top 8.

Semis and major bowls go back to New Years Day.

Championship game one week later (early January).

8 teams = 2 each from SEC, Big 10, Big 12, and ACC. They each play a conference championship game.
Champions of those 4 conference = final 4.

Notre Dame and any other schools that wanna cry can join a real conference.
And all the other conferences can play their own "tier 2" playoffs.

Split the conferences into divisions.

Division winners play in the conference championships.

The conference championships are the first round of the playoffs.

If you can't win your division, you don't get in.

If you're not in a conference, sucks to be you.


This is how the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc do things and it works.

NoahAg said:

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8 teams = 2 each from SEC, Big 10, Big 12, and ACC. They each play a conference championship game.
Champions of those 4 conference = final 4.

Notre Dame and any other schools that wanna cry can join a real conference.
And all the other conferences can play their own "tier 2" playoffs.

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Well, in reality, the SEC can have up to 3 or 4 teams ranked in the top 8. Or some years the Big 10 may be dominant. Those dominant years of a conference should be rewarded with playoff spots.

NoahAg said:

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8 teams = 2 each from SEC, Big 10, Big 12, and ACC. They each play a conference championship game.
Champions of those 4 conference = final 4.

Notre Dame and any other schools that wanna cry can join a real conference.
And all the other conferences can play their own "tier 2" playoffs.

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No auto bids! Look at this year, the ACC or the Big 12 didn't have 2 teams deserving of making it into a 12 team playoff, let alone an 8 team one.

Take your example and apply it to this year. We're out, because of a tiebreaker in conference. Duke would be in.

Not to mention you make tougher conferences eat each other in the first round. Duke moves right along to your final 4 with their 5 loss season.

9 will always cry. I think 8 works given that 5-8 cleaned house last year. But I think 9 and above don't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning it all.

However I don't think there is a best scenario. There will always be flaws in any system proposed for college footall.

Skubalon said:

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Split the conferences into divisions.

Division winners play in the conference championships.

The conference championships are the first round of the playoffs.

If you can't win your division, you don't get in.

If you're not in a conference, sucks to be you.


This is how the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc do things and it works.

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Yeah it works in pro sports because they draft players, have salary caps, trade deadlines, etc. You can't have parity in college football when you recruit/buy players with NIL deals, they can transfer anywhere they want and be immediately eligible the next season.

Do you really want a world where CFB teams have a nationwide draft? Have players locked up under contract for a minimum of 4 years (5 if you redshirt them). The sheer number of schools would water down the talent so badly that the quality of the game would suck azz.

Fact is there will always be a team not happy. The first 2 out of any format will complain. Pick one and run with it.

Now the conference strength and G5 situations, those need to be fixed.

bslater07 said:

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No auto bids! Look at this year, the ACC or the Big 12 didn't have 2 teams deserving of making it into a 12 team playoff, let alone an 8 team one.

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I personally think that BYU was good enough to be in this year under the current format, but I think an 8 team format works better (see my post above). We already know that BYU isn't as good as Tech, so why should they be included? Answer is that they shouldn't.

If the conferences played in 8 team divisions where each team had 7 divisional games, 2 non-divisional games, and 3 non-conference games, the divisional champs would play in the first round of the playoffs in the conference championship.

Looking at last year, none of 9-12 were very competitive. Just one year though. Wonder if this year will prove different…. https://collegefootballplayoff.com/sports/2025/3/20/cfp-recap-2425.aspx

No. They probably would've found an impossible excuse to slide us into 9.

The fix is getting rid of those G5 teams.

Zackdh9 said:

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No weird format with byes, top seed gets easier path. 3 simple weeks of single elimination football.

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To be clear, three rounds quarters, semis finals, no byes, no auto-bids best eight? And very little latitude for the committee???

bslater07 said:

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Skubalon said:

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Split the conferences into divisions.

Division winners play in the conference championships.

The conference championships are the first round of the playoffs.

If you can't win your division, you don't get in.

If you're not in a conference, sucks to be you.


This is how the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc do things and it works.

---

Yeah it works in pro sports because they draft players, have salary caps, trade deadlines, etc. You can't have parity in college football when you recruit/buy players with NIL deals, they can transfer anywhere they want and be immediately eligible the next season.

Do you really want a world where CFB teams have a nationwide draft? Have players locked up under contract for a minimum of 4 years (5 if you redshirt them). The sheer number of schools would water down the talent so badly that the quality of the game would suck azz.

---

Not sure I am following you. I don't know why one leads to the next. It seems to me like it could be relatively simple to put conferences into divisions, and it would create more interesting regional rivalries that expansion destroyed (in my mind, at least).

To me the current format creates some boring and unneeded matchups. These are duplicate games that are being played this year in the CFP, or could be played:

OU vs Alabama (already played - OU won)
Oregon vs Indiana (already played - Indiana won)
Ole Miss vs Georgia (already played - Georgia won)
Ohio State vs Indiana (already played - Indiana won)

The only interesting games that involve teams from the same conference are Oregon vs. Ohio State and A&M vs. Georgia. I guess Georgia vs Alabama might be slightly interesting for a rubber match, but Georgia settled in my mind that they are a better team (decisively) in the SECCG.

I guess I'm weird but I'm not real interested in a 12 team playoff where it's possible that a bunch of the games are potentially repeats. I feel like the games should mean something.

No, an 8-team would be stupid. 16 if anything.

We shouldn't be required to go 11-1 just to make the playoff.

I know I'm the minority but I like the 12-team setup. The auto bids allow for smaller teams to make it, making college football more interesting during the regular season. 16 seems too big if you want to make every game count. 4 or 8 is too small without auto bids. There's always going to be teams mad they got left out -- no matter how many teams you let in. So stop expanding.

It's still hard to create parity among divisions. I'm thinking of the early days when we joined the SEC how straight up brutal the SEC West was. Bama was incredible, Auburn was really good most of the time, LSU very good, Mississippi state was good with Dak at the helm. Ole Miss was cheating with bags of cash under Hugh Freeze, and even Arkansas was far better than they've been lately.

Everyone is talking about not scheduling tough non-conference games anymore because it hurts your playoff chances. It's the same problem except worse if you get stuck in a division of really strong football programs (like my SEC West example) you give certain teams from weaker conferences easy paths to the playoffs.

Ag1188 said:

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No, an 8-team would be stupid. 16 if anything.

We shouldn't be required to go 11-1 just to make the playoff.

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If ya go to 16, imagine how many 3 and 4 loss teams would be complaining about being left out.

Or maybe make it the top 12 teams in the country instead of these pointless auto bids. Nobody will ever convince me that it makes sense to have a team like James Madison in the playoff. This isn't March Madness. You took away spots of two teams that would have made the games more competitive and a better watch.

I always thought 8 was the perfect number.

10 game season and a round of 64 playoffs

Like my post above. You need absolute parity to have such a defined playoff structure like you do in pro sports. Where teams more or less have equal footing via drafts/salary caps, players under contract, etc. College has become a sport of 'we can buy a national championship.'

And us not being so pissed off about Oregon and Ole Miss with gimmes.

No, it would not.

Why are people so against having a playoff in D1 football? I don't get it.

8 would be a great number if there was parity among 8 conferences, or even some between the P4 conferences, but there isn't.

Conferences don't even get the top 2 teams to the CCG because of unbalanced conference schedules.

bslater07 said:

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College has become a sport of 'we can buy a national championship.'

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It already is that now - which is why I don't understand your point about parity being required for a divisional playoff system. But that's okay. It's not important from my perspective.

By my way of thinking, college football is currently in a Cold War where the B1G and SEC are setting up rules to ensure that revenue and spending work in their favor. I mean, kudos to them. Why not?

But it's easy to see where this is all going: there will eventually be a separate division, akin to FCS and FBS, that will be a super division comprised of whatever teams are in the SEC and B1G, minus the losers and the poor, and cherry picking a few from the other outliers. Most people seem to think it will be somewhere between 40-60 teams. When they get to that place it will wind up as you've described, with collective bargaining and all that. Eligibility rules will probably be gone too. And maybe, as you say, the portal will give way to trades.

For my part, I would just like a system that doesn't involve a committee to decide who is in and who is out. Let the conferences decide on the criteria for selecting their champion, and let the champions duke it out.

That seems too simple for the big wigs that run college football, though.

Skubalon said:

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Split the conferences into divisions.

Division winners play in the conference championships.

The conference championships are the first round of the playoffs.

If you can't win your division, you don't get in.

If you're not in a conference, sucks to be you.


This is how the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc do things and it works.

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I feel like people who make comparisons like this have zero concept of how large college football is as a "league".

I get where you're coming from but you'd at least need to have some type of mini playoff within those two super conferences instead of a ridiculous number of tiebreaker layers that get so obscure, you need lawyers to figure it out.

Like this year, we're 7-1 in conference just like UGA, Bama, and OM. We miss the championship due to tiebreaker. Would be nice to be able to play your way in. In your example with 40-60 teams, you're going to end up with a lot of teams with similar records, and tiebreakers once you get past head to head, then common opponents, beyond those 2 layers they're just as bad as a stupid committee.

8 teams. No autobids. Determined by analytics.

Must play 2 OOC Power 4 teams or you're DQ'd. That helps with benchmarking between conferences.

Let your conference figure out how many conference games you play and how many cupcakes you get. If your SOR is terrible, you run the risk of not being able to beat anyone by enough to warrant a top 8 spot.

Ag1188 said:

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No, an 8-team would be stupid. 16 if anything.

We shouldn't be required to go 11-1 just to make the playoff.

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If you lose 2 regular season games, are you the best team in the nation that year?

Wouldn't no playoffs be better?

htxag09 said:

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Skubalon said:

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Split the conferences into divisions.

Division winners play in the conference championships.

The conference championships are the first round of the playoffs.

If you can't win your division, you don't get in.

If you're not in a conference, sucks to be you.


This is how the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc do things and it works.

---

I feel like people who make comparisons like this have zero concept of how large college football is as a "league".

---

The ACC has 17 teams.
The Big 12 has 16 teams.
The B1G has 18 teams.
The SEC has 16 teams.

Split them into divisions. Add a team or two, and drop a team or two as needed. The conferences can sort that out to their liking.

Let the division winners play in the conference championship, as above, etc.

Skubalon said:

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htxag09 said:

---

Skubalon said:

---

Split the conferences into divisions.

Division winners play in the conference championships.

The conference championships are the first round of the playoffs.

If you can't win your division, you don't get in.

If you're not in a conference, sucks to be you.


This is how the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc do things and it works.

---

I feel like people who make comparisons like this have zero concept of how large college football is as a "league".

---

The ACC has 17 teams.
The Big 12 has 16 teams.
The B1G has 18 teams.
The SEC has 16 teams.

Split them into divisions. Add a team or two, and drop a team or two as needed. The conferences can sort that out to their liking.

Let the division winners play in the conference championship, as above, etc.

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There are currently over 120 P5 teams. So you're effectively killing half those programs by removing them.

Then you still have to consider you have 70ish teams. Divisions work in leagues like the nfl because they have 32 total teams, 4 within a division. Those teams play each other twice.

So….sure that's all easily comparable.