For decades, the 4-team playoff was the structure for college football, leading fans to debate if the winners were truly deserving of claiming the title. In 2024, a new 12-team playoff system was instituted, tripling the size of the past playoff picture and making the road to holding the National College Football Playoff Trophy even more competitive.
The playoff includes 12 teams which are selected by the five highest-ranked conference champions who get an automatic bid. The remaining highest-ranked seven teams will round out the 12. The setup results in the top four highest-ranked conference champions receiving byes to the quarterfinals, while the others must match up based on their seed in round one. These 12 teams will go through four rounds to eventually claim the title.
The new 12-team playoff offers greater things; and can finally put to rest the idea that the champion didn’t fully earn their win. Teams going through round rounds can truly prove their superiority on the field.
“If you show it on the field and get to prove it out there, you can really claim that national championship. There’s no easy road to winning it right now,” State High Football head coach Matt Lintal said.
Every game is more meaningful than the one before and preparation is key. “You just gotta dig in. They gotta dig in deep. It’s like the regular season. No, bye weeks, playing weeks on end straight, maybe six or seven weeks in a row, playing. But this week or this year, you gotta go against all top 12 teams in the country, so you gotta just grind every day,” freshman football player Connor Kulka said.
The new layout leads to major opportunities for smaller schools. In the past, they may not have been able to make it to the playoffs because of the excellence needed to be a top-four team. This benefits the bigger schools as well, who now don’t need to strive for perfection because now losing one or two games is not the end of season.
“I think that 12-team playoff is a lot better because it gives more team opportunities. Like I said earlier, you don’t have to win everything. You can still be in and you never know,” Kulka said.
Yet, problems still arise with this new format. First, all four teams who held a bye all dropped games to lower seeded teams. People thought that the seeding was not good at giving the best team the best path to the championship.
A team such as Penn State that was given the sixth seed only had to face SMU and Boise State, which people felt were lesser opponents, compared to first seeded Oregon who had to face a very strong Ohio State team. Not only that, but prolonging the season for these college athletes can have serious health issues due to the physicality of football.
“There’s been no downtime for any of these teams since…the beginning of August,” Lintal said. “Injury and injury prevention, I think, is critical…You can’t be running them [players] ragged every day in practice and expecting them to perform on the weekends after 13 or 14 games.”
With the new format, team will need to adapt to the longer season so that chances of success are higher.
“I think those are things that can be, and hopefully will be ironed out, you know, they’re building the plane as they’re flying it, I think right now, they’ll work out those details as they go,” Lintal said.
The 12-team playoff is here to stay. So far, with the path to success looking promising and underlying problems being discovered, the focus is on what the future holds.
