Tennessee head coach Josh Huepel made news this week when he argued for a 24-team College Football Playoff.
"The way college football is constantly changing, that probably makes the most sense," Heupel said.
I don't mean to patronize Heupel or any other coaches when I make this comparison, but it's the most apt one I can think to make. Coaches shouldn't get a say on any future CFP changes for the same reason 5-year-olds shouldn't get to make the grocery list. Both groups are thinking about their own personal well-being in that moment first, and their long-term best interests dead last.
Of course, Heupel and others (Kirby Smart, Bret Bielema, Eli Drinkwitz and others have argued for a 24-plus team bracket) want larger CFP brackets. It's best for their short- and long-term job security. But in lowering the bar for themselves, they systematically lower the stakes for everyone.
This used to be obvious, but since many within the sport are actively trying to blur this point out I'll repeat it anyway: For all of its 150-plus year history, what separated major college football from every other sport was the urgency of the regular season. A 24-team CFP waters the regular season down to a point beyond recognition. Comparing the FBS postseason to every other sport -- even other divisions within NCAA football -- is foolhardy, and I'll explain why.
1) Don't FCS, D2 and D3 have larger playoff brackets?
Yes, they do. And they award automatic bids to every conference champion. Division III's 40-team bracket awards 27 auto-bids and a scant 13 at-larges across its 241 teams. If a 24-team CFP awarded bids to the MAC champion and the Sun Belt champion and the American champ and the C-USA champ and the Pac-12 champ and the Mountain West champ, this would be a different discussion. But it wouldn't. This would be an event for the SEC, the Big Ten and Notre Dame first, the ACC and Big 12 second, and the Group of Six a distant third.
The proper fraction to understand a 24-team CFP isn't 24/138 (the total FBS membership this fall), it's 24/68 (the P4 plus Notre Dame) or even 16/34 (the approximate number of teams that would qualify from the SEC and Big Ten).
2) The NFL has a compelling regular season and playoffs. What's wrong with copying that?
The SEC placed seven teams among the CFP's final top 24 in 2025 (Tennessee was not among them). The Big Ten got six, the Big 12 five, and the ACC three. The SEC's 7/16 ratio mirrors the NFL, but it misses three points:
1) The NFL's draft and free agency level the talent acquisition playing field that will never be possible in college football. The worst NFL teams are always going to be closer than the best than their equivalents in college football.
2) There are no Furmans or Kennesaw States -- 2026 Tennessee opponents, both -- on an NFL team's schedule.
3) The NFL is the NFL, and college football is college football. Mimicking the NFL will not turn college football into the NFL Jr.; it will turn the game into AAA baseball.
3) People love March Madness
The other common argument is that college basketball's large tournament format is beloved. Indeed, people love their college basketball in March. And March only. When's the last time you cleared your schedule to watch a January college basketball game your team wasn't involved in?
The obvious retort here is that Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, working for his Fox overlords, are pushing hard enough for 24 teams that they'll probably get what they want in time. And they probably will. But that doesn't change the underlying truth: they're also 5-year-olds filling their proverbial buggy with powdered donuts and Cheeto puffs. Very few people in power are looking out for the game's interests, and it's an existential threat to the sport.
I'll leave you with this: Notre Dame and Texas were both good enough to make Miami-like runs through December and January. But the Irish and the Longhorns missing the CFP because of losses they suffered in September and October isn't a flaw of the 12-team CFP, it's a feature that keeps the urgency of the regular season alive.