You can imagine a time, years from now, when the expanded system for the College Football Playoff is such a part of the furniture that these past years — when only four squads got the chance to vie for supremacy — will be seen as a quirky little interlude.
Maybe the CFP will feature even more teams by then, who knows? Perhaps — but probably not — there will be a December Madness and a 32-team bracket to find the best team in the country.
Anyway, enough crystal ball gazing. The point is, that while the current and expiring four-team method used to determine a champion has become an entrenched part of our sports consumption, it will take next to no time before it is forgotten, and the new order just becomes what we expect, and what we set our calendars to.
Once the present path is gone it won’t be deeply lamented. We’re not nostalgic enough for that. Yes, history stirs our soul on some level, but in sports we rock out harder for the future than for the present, whatever the memorabilia merchants want you to believe.
By the time 2023’s postseason fray is complete, there will have been 10 four-team CFPs, and that number will remain etched in time, for athletics doesn’t really do the whole looking-over-its-shoulder thing. The days of four, with the sum total of the national title hostilities being two semifinals and a final, will essentially have formulated just a tiny fraction of college football history.
That said, this decade-long stretch, and the push to even get a playoff to begin with, should not be sent to the recesses of our minds entirely, for it took a long time to get to and has set up everything that’s still to come.
For many of college football’s youngest fans, it is a head-scratcher that there was even a period like the BCS era when only two teams were picked to play for it all. And, before that, decades of bowls that rarely pitted the two top-ranked heavyweights against each other.
The best part of the CFP is that it has brought juicy matchups that truly matter into our slipstream and made us realize that college football is never, and will never be, devoid of debate, which formula you use and however many teams you let in.
It allowed hope to flourish for programs even after one defeat, and it took six years for the first No. 1 seed to win — LSU in the 2019 campaign behind the lightning talents of Joe Burrow.
It spawned some classic games, with epic semifinals like the Georgia–Oklahoma classic in 2017 and Ohio State’s unforgettable upset of Alabama in Year 1, 2014, which immediately showed that if you increase the elimination action you’ll charge up the rate of special moments.
And no, ‘Bama didn’t win it every year, despite what it felt like at times.
Will Alabama return to the CFP next season?
But being restricted to four has allowed for a bit of a closed shop, which was the ultimate spur for things to grow at the end of the upcoming season. No more will the likes of Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Georgia get to battle things out between themselves.
Twelve is coming. Four has one last hurrah.
One thing to consider, as the 12-team frenzy moves closer, is that for a week in January of 2025 and 2026, there isn’t going to be room for much else in your life.
In each of those years, there will be a compacted football extravaganza, where the second week of the New Year will see the Thursday and Friday host a College Football Playoff semifinal. Saturday will bring a pair of NFL Wild Card Weekend matchups. Sunday showcases three do-or-die NFL showdowns, with another reserved for Monday.
Five nights of consecutive football isn’t entirely unheard of — remember those weird days during COVID when Tuesday and Wednesday football was a routine thing? But five nights that cocoon some of the biggest and most significant games in both the college and pro space, all into a tiny window? That’s going to be a football addict’s dream.
Super Bowl vs. CFP: Which is harder to win?
The public’s unquenchable thirst for high-stakes football is, of course, why things had to grow. The first weekend of the new playoff, plus the quarterfinal weekend around New Year, will instantly become a cornerstone of the winter-watching slate. There will still be debate, and there will still be teams annoyed to be left out, because if the party is a good one, it hurts to be on the outside peeking through the window.
It is, frankly, going to be awesome.
But not just yet. One more year of the four-team CFP remains, and if it is like the others, it will bring no shortage of thrills. Amid all the excitement of the expansion, now is probably a good moment to acknowledge that the present way of doing things has served us well.
The four-team system isn’t soon-to-be-gone because it was wrong. It just whetted our appetite for more.
