The 24-Team College Football Playoff Isn’t Ruining Anything — Here’s What Actually Should Bother You

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College football’s offseason has one volume setting lately, and it’s maximum outrage. The likely expansion to a 24-team playoff has people on social media declaring existential crises, mourning the death of the regular season, and generally behaving as if someone just announced the sport is being cancelled. Most of it is misguided noise — and I say that as someone who has spent years studying where college football came from and how it got to where it is today.

Let me be direct: I’m not upset about a 24-team playoff. Not even a little.

The Regular Season Argument Doesn’t Hold Up

The loudest talking point right now is that the regular season won’t matter anymore. This is, to put it plainly, nonsense. One media personality recently posted a photo of the Alabama-Auburn Iron Bowl as an example of a game that would lose its meaning. Think about that for a second. The Iron Bowl has been played since 1893. Those schools have a rivalry built on more than a century of history, regional identity, and genuine hatred — the good kind — that goes well beyond football. A playoff bracket isn’t touching that.

The same goes for Nebraska and Iowa, or Ohio State and Michigan, or any of the other matchups that define the sport for its fans. And here’s the part that nobody seems to want to say out loud: if Nebraska and Iowa are playing with a playoff berth on the line instead of a mid-tier bowl game that nobody watches, doesn’t that actually make the game more meaningful? The same media voices complaining about playoff expansion have spent years telling us the bowl system is bloated and meaningless. You can’t have it both ways.

This Is Just Change — And Change Is Hard

Here’s a question worth sitting with: is college football actually being ruined, or is it just changing? Those are two very different things, and human beings — regardless of age — are notoriously bad at telling them apart. Nobody likes change. It doesn’t matter if you’re 25 or 65. Change feels like loss even when it isn’t.

College football has been changing constantly since the sport was invented. The AP poll didn’t start until 1936. For decades before that, teams sometimes just declared themselves national champions. After the poll started, coaches and writers voted on the national champion before the bowl games were even played — and they did that for roughly 40 years.

Nobody said the sport was being destroyed. They said it was dumb, and they were right, and eventually it changed.

We went from no playoff to a two-team championship game to a four-team playoff to 12 teams, and now we’re likely heading to 24. Each step brought the same predictions of doom. The sport is still here. Viewership is still climbing. People are still watching even through NIL, the transfer portal, conference realignment, and every other seismic shift of the last several years.

The 24-Team Playoff Already Exists — In College Football

Here’s something that almost never comes up in these conversations: college football already operates a 40-team playoff. It runs every year in the lower divisions — FCS, Division II, Division III — and the sport functions just fine. The people wringing their hands about logistics and scheduling and how this could possibly work are not solving a new problem. They’re solving a problem that football people figured out a long time ago. Nobody is inventing interstellar flight here.

Where Your Frustration Should Actually Go

If you want to be angry about something in college football right now, here’s a legitimate target: the disappearing marquee non-conference game. Programs are canceling high-profile series. Big-name matchups that fans actually want to see are being replaced with cupcake opponents and neutral-site spectacles designed purely for television revenue. That is a problem worth screaming about.

Go look at Indiana’s 2026 schedule and tell me the beginning of that season isn’t garbage. The same could be said for Nebraska.

The fix is actually simple. The College Football Playoff selection committee could announce tomorrow that strength of schedule carries significantly more weight in the selection criteria. That single change would force programs to stop ducking difficult non-conference opponents. It would make the regular season more meaningful, not less. If you’re going to direct energy somewhere, direct it there.

And while you’re at it, direct some toward the NCAA itself — an organization that has shown almost no meaningful leadership for decades, sat on its hands while lawsuit after lawsuit reshaped the sport, and repeatedly failed to get ahead of the changes that were obviously coming. The 1982 Supreme Court ruling in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma cracked open the door to the television money era. The NCAA had decades to build a coherent structure around what was coming. They didn’t. That failure, more than any playoff format, is what put college football in its current complicated position.

The Bottom Line

Ask yourself why you watch college football in the first place. If the answer has anything to do with your university, your region, your family’s Saturday traditions, or a rivalry that’s been burning for a hundred years — none of that goes away because there are 24 teams in a playoff field instead of 12.

The things that make this sport matter are older and deeper than any format change.

College football is changing. It has always been changing. That’s not the same thing as being ruined — and it’s worth knowing the difference.

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