An enormous change is potentially coming to one of the most popular sports, with the proposal of a 24-team College Football Playoff. Recently, the American Football Coaches Association voted to recommend to the sports’ decision makers that a postseason with “the maximum number of participants” should be implemented, eliminate conference title games, and schedule contests on the same day as the Army-Navy game. This proposal is objectively terrible for college football, as it removes one of the best weeks of the year for fans and replaces it with blowouts of mediocre teams. An expanded playoff doesn’t fix the issues currently plaguing the sport; it only makes matters worse.
Why The 24-Team College Football Playoff Is Bad For The Sport
The most obvious reason why the expanded playoff is bad is that it devalues the regular season, and it removes one of the best weeks in the sport from the calendar. If there was a 24-team postseason, it wouldn’t be inconceivable to have a three-loss or even four-loss national champion, which cheapens the sport as a whole. The removal of conference championship week takes away marquee match-ups that have a significant impact on the selection process. Not only is the regular season less meaningful, but teams that need a signature win late in the season will be missing a crucial data point, leading to a weaker playoff field and random seeding for teams.
What’s overlooked with the expanded playoff is that it doesn’t benefit anyone. The truly elite teams will be playing at least one additional playoff game in this format, meaning that the national title game will have worse quality because both teams will have heavy wear-and-tear at that point. Lower-seeded squads aren’t likely to shake up the playoffs, because that has rarely happened in the 12-team format (Miami was clearly under-seeded last year, and the committee putting Alabama and Ole Miss over them was absolutely criminal). The only group that might benefit from an expanded playoff are mediocre coaches trying to cash in on performance bonuses.
What To Do About Army-Navy?
There are significant obstacles to clear before a 24-team playoff becomes reality. For starters, the playoffs will have to generate enough revenue to cover the loss of conference championship games, which is estimated to be $250 million. The far bigger problem is what to do with the Army-Navy game in mid-December.
That contest hampers the ability to schedule an expanded playoff, but any plan to move the date of that game will be met with heavy resistance, both by college football traditionalists and the federal government (President Donald Trump signed an executive order in 2025 to protect the rivalry as the only college football game to be played during a four-hour window). These challenges make an expanded playoff difficult, but not impossible.
An expanded playoff might be the final nail in the coffin for college football. Between lax transfer rules and players staying in college as long as possible to chase NIL deals, the sport itself is not in the best spot it has ever been in. A 24-team postseason handing out participation trophies to teams that don’t deserve a chance at a national championship might turn off fans of the sport forever. Modern college football is nothing more than the NFL with unregulated free agency, while the Big Ten and SEC are cannibalizing the sport with realignment, and an expanded playoff doesn’t fix these issues.
