Dan Wetzel predicts 24-team playoff could lead Ohio State and Michigan to leave Big Ten

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A 24-team College Football Playoff is all but confirmed, and while it’s already attracting critics for all the obvious concerns, there will undoubtedly be plenty of unintended consequences, too. Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports has a prediction on one of them.

The Big Ten and the SEC have been the driving forces behind the College Football Playoff expansion push, but Wetzel thinks that the expanded field will have an unintended consequence for the conferences that will lead them to regret pushing for the expansion.

“College athletics is terrible at seeing problems around the corner. The 24-team playoff is the latest example,” Wetzel wrote on X. “A lot of schools that supported this will regret it because in the end it won’t be about the playoff or even the now diminished regular season.”

While the conferences that pushed for the change ultimately got their wish, Wetzel argues that, ironically, Notre Dame has emerged as the big winner under the new system because it is independent of the conferences.

“Notre Dame now has the best situation in all of football – almost 100 percent guarantee to make the playoff, freedom to schedule as it wishes, maximization of its own media value,” he wrote.

From there, Wetzel wondered why college football’s top programs across the country wouldn’t try to copy that model.

“To use the Big Ten as an example, why wouldn’t Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State follow? If you can, be independent. That’s the future,” Wetzel continued. “The 18-team Big Ten is bloated, distant, and winning it carries little intrinsic or competitive value for the biggest brands.”

Wetzel claimed that those three schools could form their own scheduling agreement that would “increase their media revenue 2-3x,” with “no sharing money” and “no forced TV times.”

“Staying in the Big Ten now makes little and perhaps no economic sense,” he added.

Obviously, this would be bad news for the conferences that pushed for playoff expansion, but it would also be bad news for the smaller programs that thought they would benefit from the system.

Wetzel predicted that smaller programs that backed expansion because they’d get a shot at what he called the “participation playoff” with an 8-4 record are now “facing significant risk in the future” once major programs realize there is little incentive to stay in a conference.

“There will come a day when they will [not] get a share of the Ohio State-Michigan windfall; only Ohio State and Michigan will,” Wetzel wrote. “Maybe not tomorrow, but I believe a 24-team playoff makes it closer than ever.”

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