re: Why are you mad about a 24-team playoff?

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now you are damaging the regular season

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This keeps getting repeated, and it couldn't be more wrong. In the final week of the regular season this year, only a couple of games will matter. Once the playoffs expand, about 30+ teams will be competing to either make the playoffs or earn byes or better seeds to host.

Personally, the part I don't like is the byes. I'd rather have 8 or 16 or even 32. Teams with byes have horrible records so it hasn't turned out to be the advantage everyone thought. Maybe that changes with the new format.

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How? If you think teams/fans won't care about losing regular season games, you've completely lost your mind

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Didn't realize fans were the sport.

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get in" to "lets win so we can get a higher seed" - every sport works this way.

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Its less about higher seeding and more about getting in. You will find resting players in regular season becoming the norm. Less anticipation and desperation in winning certain regular season games. Not understanding this is what the issue is. Every sport that has the expanded playoff model doesn't have the same regular season desperation because the outcomes do not matter as much. Happens in every sport.

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I don't know what the plan is for conference championship games, but do you really care about them?

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They're going away, the agreement was to get a buyout, with the expanded playoff they need additional weeks so they're eliminating Conference Championships. And yes SEC Championship game was always awesome, we went every year despite who got in. Nick Saban and Kirby have talked how much they love that game.

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You're telling me not to be "fooled" by literally every other team sport? (including football at other levels)

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Because they didn't have the same Regular season. The Regular Season was what separated FBS College Football from other sports. You're speaking as someone who doesn't understand College Football. This decision was made too quickly, we haven't even mastered the 12 team playoff. The selection process is extremely flawed until that gets fixed adding more teams doesn't solve that issue.

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This keeps getting repeated, and it couldn't be more wrong. In the final week of the regular season this year, only a couple of games will matter. Once the playoffs expand, about 30+ teams will be competing to either make the playoffs or earn byes or better seeds to host.

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This is a sport that has 138 teams currently. Those teams that are "fighting" to get a spot aren't guaranteed to be playing each other like in Professional sports. Having quality teams miss the playoff due to their record is a good thing for College Football. Just adding more teams is not.

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This doesn't improve the sport. Look how many uncompetitive games the playoff already has until they fix the teams that get in, adding more teams doesn't fix that, it makes it worse.

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I was fine with expansion to 12. Even 16 would have been ok. 24 is too many.

It's going to bring in bottom of the top 25 teams, who are just slightly above average teams, and smaller conf. teams who we have already seen can't compete with the best major conf. teams. There will be some comparisons to the basektball tournament and how the 1st two rounds are arguably the most entertaining because of the upsets. However, the gap between basketball teams is much closer than football teams. Watching 8-4 Iowa play 9-3 Arizona may be fun for those fanbases, but the rest of the country won't care about a game between two slightly above average teams.

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taking away the Conference Championship games

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This is the one POSITIVE. Those games were the original money grab. They are totally unnecessary and for too often are a disadvantage for the teams who are forced to play them. We've seen multiple times where teams that were forced to play in the conf. championship game lost, and were left out of the CFP because of the loss in favor of a team that did not have to play in conf. championship game. It happened again just last year with BYU being bumped out because it lost the Big 12 CG in favor of Miami who did not play in the ACC game. Plus, coaches of the really good teams that are forced to play in those game HATE them because it does nothing but reward success with an added, unnecessary, burden.

I'm happy to see them go.

Agree with this. We have had a playoff for years. The bowl games were it but like you said we had to guess the champions. Most champs back in the day never even played the other top team that year.

The days of losing a game and you’re out during the season kind of sucks when you look at it. LSU would have been done after ole miss.

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This is the one POSITIVE. Those games were the original money grab. They are totally unnecessary and for too often are a disadvantage for the teams who are forced to play them. We've seen multiple times where teams that were forced to play in the conf. championship game lost, and were left out of the CFP because of the loss in favor of a team that did not have to play in conf. championship game. It happened again just last year with BYU being bumped out because it lost the Big 12 CG in favor of Miami who did not play in the ACC game.

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Quality teams being left out are good for the sport not bad. Again that separated College Football from other sports. The Selection process is and has always been flawed, adding more teams isn't going to change that. Taking away competitive games make the selection process worse. 16 should have been the only expansion if they NEEDED one to take away the byes. But as it relates to the Championship Conference games, they have had real playoff implications and now they're gone. You're not going to have as many of those games moving forward and that SUCKS for the sport which is why people like Pate and others opposed this stupid 24 team expansion.

If 24 teams is good, then 48 teams could be better. ??

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Because #s13-24 are never going to win it al

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I’m not sure that’s true. A team could lose a couple—or even a few—early due to injuries or just not gelling, get hot, go on a run, and win it all. Especially an SEC team with the ridiculous 9th game added. That was such a clusterfrick by Sankey and why he had to agree to the 24 team model because he knows he screwed the conference by adding that 9th game completely unnecessarily. It automatically adds a loss to half the teams in the conference. It adds to the already brutal grind of an SEC schedule. But one thing that I’ve talked about that no one else seems to really consider, is that it forces everybody to play an unbalanced schedule. Half the teams have to play 5 road SEC games instead of 4 now. And we’ve seen this year with the parity in the league and in the sport overall, that home field really, really matters.

But that’s not an argument FOR the 24 team playoff, it’s an argument AGAINST it. I don’t want 3 or 4 loss teams sneaking in and being able to go on a run. That diminishes the regular season substantially. Which is what has made college football sacred. The OP listed all the other football leagues and levels that have bigger playoffs and college football having historically been the exception. YES!!! EXACTLY!!! That’s the whole point. It’s what made it unique. And why a huge portion of the people that post on this board thought college football was the greatest sport in the world.

And if you—not YOU, bluestem, the royal “you,”—don’t think it will kill the regular season, you’re an ignorant fool. EVERY single time a sport has expanded their playoff, their regular seasons have become less and less important. I love sports. All of the big 3 for sure. I’m in my late 40s, so my priorities have changed and that’s certainly a contributor, but growing up, if a baseball game was on tv and I was home, I was watching it. Suffered through the ‘85-‘90 Braves’ atrocious teams and watched every game I could on my little 13” black and white tv. It got a lot more fun when they started winning in ‘91. I was glued to every regular season game from ‘91-‘93. Because there were only 4 divisions in all of MLB. East and West of both leagues. A 4 team playoff. Regular season games mattered significantly down to the last day. The Braves and Giants had the best records in baseball in ‘93, but both played in the NL West, so only one team made the playoffs(Braves won 104 to the Giants 103). That was incredibly exciting. But, I realize now like the league did, that that was only exciting for the teams still in it. Regular season games quit mattering to most teams long before the end of September. So they expanded the league and the playoffs by 1 round, making it an 8 team playoff instead of 4. And teenage Hot Carl quit watching regular season games as much. Quit planning my day around them. Sure, I’d watch if I was home and they happened to be on, but I didn’t go out of my way. The Braves were so good that they were almost assured of making a 4-team NL playoff. And with each expansion of the playoffs, I started to watch less and less regular season games. Now, I don’t watch any. Wake me up in October.

And it’s been the same for every other sport. I like the NBA. But it’s 2 different seasons now, the regular season, then the playoffs. Wake me up when the playoffs start. NFL? Same thing. I’ll watch almost every Saints game, but other than that, I’m not watching any other regular season games. And almost nobody else would either if it weren’t for fantasy football and gambling. When a 10-6 or 9-7 team started winning the Super Bowl? Wake me up when the playoffs start. College basketball besides LSU? Wake me up in March.

Because when you expand the playoffs, the regular season only matters on the cumulative. Individual games do not. I have been a college football fanatic for 40 years now. Watched every big game on tv all day. Wouldn’t go hunting with my dad because I didn’t want to miss any games. And I was ok with the 4 team playoff. Loved the BCS, but realized it was only because LSU never got hosed. Most years 1 or 2 teams had separated themselves, but there were a few years where a 3rd team got screwed. So 4 was fine. (Though I thought it should be 6 with the top 2 teams getting a bye. You’d hate to see an ‘11 or ‘19 LSU team
not get rewarded for their incredible regular seasons by having to play a good team on a neutral field in an extra round). But when they went to 12, I quit tuning into all the big early season games with undivided attention that didn’t involve LSU. Y’all remember the amazing ‘24 early October game against Oregon and Ohio State when the Ducks squeaked out a 1 point win at home? No? Neither does anyone else. Because Ohio State won the game that mattered in the playoffs. Bama and Georgia last week was a great matchup, and a great game. I’ll have to take your word on it, because I didn’t watch a single play. Granted, they were on while LSU was, but I usually would have switched back and forth. But now, I can just wait until they meet up again in the SECCG and/or the playoffs. I said “and” because there’s a decent chance they play 3 times this year. So could Indiana and Ohio State. And you can fricking miss me with that bullshite. And a 24 team playoff will almost mathematically guarantee a couple of rematches.

That’s how the regular season—and the sport—will suffer by diminishing the regular season. Every game will have lower stakes. We will all still watch LSU. Every other fanbase will watch their schools’ games. But they’ll quit watching all the others until the playoffs. And you will eventually see a gigantic crash in tv ratings for regular season games. May take a few years, but it’s coming. So is less attendance at home regular season games. It is coming. And when novelty of all the cool matchups we haven’t seen much of in the playoffs starts happening—when Georgia and Bama play for the 7th time in 4 years, or when LSU and Michigan, who have never played before, play 3 times in 5 years, the numbers for the playoffs will start to drop significantly too. “Wake me up in January for the semifinals.” This is a short term money grab made by people either incapable of seeing the guaranteed unintended consequences or just don’t care. And it will destroy the sport.

(Oh, I don’t even mention all the stars that will be siting out regular season games throughout the year. Gonna be a huge uptick in hamstring tweaks and ankle twists.)

Agreed .

Perfect seasons don’t matter any more.

Winning when it counts matters.

Depth and injuries will be most important.

I’m not mad about it because with parity, teams actually have a chance to advance and play more games. I’m sure top teams will get byes and at least we won’t be watching meaningless bowl games. With something to play for, This will also help with all the bowl game opt outs.