The expanded 12-team College Football Playoff is here — and it already has problems.

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Inside the College Football Playoff meeting room, at a resort hotel in the posh community of Las Colinas, the industry’s most powerful leaders played a game: a bracket game.

Gathered around a table, the FBS commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director projected a 12-team playoff bracket by applying the 2022 rankings. Eight months away from a historic 2024 CFP selection day — the inaugural expanded playoff — the bracketing exercise commenced as a way to show executives the matchups, trends and perhaps even issues (we’ll get to that later) produced with a new format.

A couple hours later, a handful of reporters were ushered into the room to do the same, sitting in the exact chairs in which commissioners previously resided as outgoing CFP director Bill Hancock guided the room through the process. In front of us, a projection screen flickered to life with a bracket: a 2022 12-team playoff based on the rankings that year and considering realignment moves.

First-round matchups — at on-campus sites of the better seed — included No. 8 seed Tennessee hosting No. 9 Kansas State, No. 12 seed Tulane at No. 5 TCU, No. 10 Southern Cal at No. 7 Alabama and … No. 11 Penn State at No. 6 Ohio State.

The latter is a rematch.

That’s Problem No. 1: As it stands now, there is no CFP protocol on avoiding first-round rematches.

But before we get into details of all of the problems with a 5+7 12-team playoff format, let’s go over some ground rules about a format that can be a bit confusing.

- Rule 1: The format. The five highest-ranked conference champions earn automatic qualifying spots into the field. This will normally include a Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, ACC and a Group of Five representative (it’s unlikely a second G5 champion would leap a P4 champion in the rankings). The highest-ranked four champions — this is important — earn the top four seeds and first-round byes. At-large spots are designated for the next seven highest-ranked teams.

- Rule 2: The rankings. These are still made by the CFP selection committee, and they will NOT necessarily align with the seeding since seeds Nos. 1-4 are reserved only for conference champions. There are plenty of examples of a conference champion being ranked lower than another conference’s second-place finisher (we get to that later).

- Rule 3: The New Year’s Six bowls host the quarterfinals and semifinals after the four first-round, on-campus games. Teams are paired with bowls in two ways: (1) traditional relationships and (2) geography.

Enough rules, let’s get to the complaints — chief among them is that no protocol exists for selection members to avoid rematches in the first round. This is a simple, solvable problem. Like the NCAA basketball tournament selection, the CFP could implement a protocol requiring first-round games to feature two teams from separate conferences when possible. With such a small field (12) and conferences steadily expanding, there may be times where it is not possible.

But for the most part, it is. Such a protocol is necessary because modeling shows that this format, combined with realignment moves, produces a lot of rematches. An entire conference dissolved, the Big 12 and SEC swelled to 16 teams and the ACC and Big Ten grew to 18.

While considering realignment, there would have been seven first-round, conference-vs.-conference rematches over the 10 years of the CFP — far too many.

Even commissioners acknowledged as much after their bracketing exercise.

“A lot of rematches,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said.

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