A Step Too Far: Has Playoff Expansion Ruined College Football's Regular Season

By: Mac Brown

For generations now, college football has had the most crucial and significant regular season in all of organized team sports. For the younger readers, there once was a time where losing a single regular season game, especially past the month of October, meant your national title hopes were all but gone. As time marched on, we collectively realized having title hopes crushed before Halloween and having only two true title contenders at seasons end wasn't representative of the immense talent and passion college football had to offer. And thus the birth of the College Football Playoff. Like anything in this world, the four-team playoff format wasn't perfect, but it did allow the regular season to still be as crucial as ever. With the recent expansion to twelve teams and even talks of further expansion, it looks like things could be changing on that front. Most everyone seems to be happy with expansion but have we perhaps gone too far by diminishing the best regular season sports had to offer?

Ratings wouldn't say so. In 2007, at the height of the BCS era, the Michigan-Ohio State game had 6.0 million viewers. Last year the same game had 18.4 million viewers. You can virtually do this with any matchups that may have happened 20 years ago and the results will be the same. Now, it's important to note that there are some key factors that could directly attribute to those inflated numbers other than popularity growth. Starting with the most obvious, according to Census data, there were 301.2 million people living in the US in 2007 and 341.8 million people in 2025. You also need to factor in how there are drastically more ways in which someone can watch a game in 2025 than their were almost twenty years ago. Those and other factors have certainly played a role in the increased viewership, but numbers don't lie. College football is the most popular it's ever been. Popularity doesn't always equate to quality though.

If you do want to be nitpicky about ratings, the highest rated National Championship Game was in 2006 with 35.6 million viewers watching the all-time classic between Texas and USC. The highest rated CFP National Championship Game so far is the first one ever, Ohio State vs Oregon with 34.1 million viewers. Viewership has essentially gone down every year until last year when it broke the 30 million viewer threshold again. Time will tell us which trend continues.

2024 was the first year the CFP expanded to 12 teams. One of those 12 teams was Ohio State. The same Ohio State that was coming off of a 13-10 loss to bitter, unranked rival, Michigan. There were even talks of Ryan Day being fired. Everyone probably knows that same Buckeye team went on to dominate in the CFP, win the national championship, and effectively save their head coaches job. This would have been borderline impossible twenty years ago. The only year in the BCS era where a team lost it's final regular season game and still went on to play in the national championship was 2007, when Arkansas beat LSU in 3OT. If 2007 wouldn't have been the year of the upset and chaos, the Tigers' season would've ended there. It's already happened twice in the CFP era though with Auburn beating Alabama in 2017 and the previously mentioned Buckeyes. Losing to your rival in the final week of the season used to mean that you probably weren't getting a ring that year. Now, it's not even a speedbump in the way to a title. And that simply just doesn't feel like college football.

You might be saying, "Well, it happened in 2007 and no one batted an eye. Most even consider that one of the best college football seasons ever." And you'd be right. But what made that season so crazy and memorable isn't that LSU was still able to "sneak in" and win a championship, it was that the second ranked team lost seven different times in the final nine weeks and the number one team lost in back-to-back weeks to end the season. This created one of the most memorable seasons of all time. Being a top-2 team ranked in the BCS meant you were the two teams competing for the national championship, so these games were massive. 2007 is arguably why the CFP system exists in the first place. Now, if the #2 team lost seven different times in the last nine weeks of the season, all seven of those teams would likely still make the CFP. Some may like that but the delta is undeniable. In another 20 years, I challenge you to see if college football fans feel the same way they do about 2017 and 2024 as they do 2007.

It was the chaos of 2007 that simply made it so memorable. Chaos that is all but lost in the regular season when you keep expanding the playoff. The regular season was in affect the playoff, and most seemed perfectly okay with that. Change is inevitable in this world and the college football regular season wasn't going to be the exception to that. But when you can turn on your TV in mid-August the last two season and hear analysts say an "8-4 Florida team could sneak in with that schedule" or "If A&M goes 8-4, they could still get in" you've got to accept that the regular season is merely a warmup for any highly-valued roster. Time will tell if college football fans will enjoy a significant emphasis on the postseason or not. But it's hard to imagine one of the pillars of what made the sport so great disappearing and there being no major backlash.

Ultimately, the regular season meaning as much as it did was a keystone to why so many people loved this sport so dearly. Someone who's never experienced an intense rivalry may not get it, but there's undoubtedly Crimson Tide and Buckeye fans that would pick beating Auburn or Michigan respectively over winning a national championship in any given season. College football truthfully might have the most passionate fans on the planet and that passion shouldn't be bottled up to a few weekends in December and January. The powers that be need to understand what a precious artifact the college football regular season was and that any further tampering of it may have undesired results. There's plenty of other ways to emulate professional football without sacrificing the best regular season sports had to offer. But as long as the playoff is expanded, and continues to do so, this is what college football fans will get with their once heralded regular season.