The inaugural year of the 12-team NCAA College Football Playoff (CFP) in the US has bewildered and enraged fans of the sport and generated comments by broadcasters that often revealed more about their own personal biases and financial connections than their expertise. I’ve commented about the CFP on X, and decided it was time to propose a blueprint for how it might go next year.

I started where I thought the 2024 College Football Playoff Selection Committee was starting, or should have started: the 2024 NCAAF Final Rankings. Rightly or wrongly, conference champions aside, this provides the mythical “top 12 teams who get to compete for the championship” the tournament is supposed to be about. Next, this proposal eliminates what the Committee did this year: awarding four teams home games in the first round, then every other game the rest of the way is a bowl game at a neutral site. A lot of the high-handed and wrongheaded takes about “teams who didn’t deserve to be in the CFP” has been directed at upstarts/challengers who had to take on four traditional college football powerhouses ON THOSE POWERHOUSES’ HOME FIELDS. So Notre Dame, Penn State, Texas, and Ohio State, all at home, beat Indiana, SMU, Clemson, and Tennessee, respectively. Few of the so-called media experts and social media catcallers have had the intellectual honesty to admit that most other powerhouses/football factories — including their favorites who didn’t make the CFP — would have lost those games in football-crazy hostile environments, too, and lost big.

Did #1 seed Oregon get a home game in the second round? No. It got a neutral site bowl game against what many fans now think may be the best team in college football, Ohio State, and lost handily.

On to the proposal, laid out as it would have looked using the NCAAF Final Rankings above. It makes the regular season meaningful by pitting 1 vs 12, 2 vs 11, and so on, and continues that pattern throughout the tournament with remaining high to low seeds.

1st Round would have been:
1 Oregon vs 12 ASU
2 Georgia vs 11 Alabama
3 Texas vs 10 SMU
4 Penn State vs 9 Boise State
5 Notre Dame vs 8 Indiana
6 Ohio State vs 7 Tennessee

Predicted 2nd Round:
2 Georgia vs 12 ASU 
3 Texas vs 6 Ohio State
4 Penn State vs 5 Notre Dame

Predicted 3rd Round: highest remaining seed gets a bye (the only one of the tournament). The other 2 play:
6 Ohio State vs 12 ASU

Predicted Championship Game:
5 Notre Dame vs 6 Ohio State

A final word about first-round home games

Although I’ve heard no explanation from the Committee about why four teams out of 12 got home games in this current CFP, I’m anticipating it might be along the lines of, “There aren’t enough bowl games, we needed to add four home games to make it work.”

Not buying it.

This expanded playoff has been discussed for years (and years, and years) before it finally materialized in 2024. What used to be a select lineup of college bowl games has ballooned over the years into a menagerie of colorfully-sponsored and -monikered bowl events including the Wasabi Fenway Bowl, the StaffDNA Cure Bowl, the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl, the TransPerfect Music City Bowl, and the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.

DON’T tell me there aren’t enough neutral-field bowl games to host four more. Or, if there truly aren’t: invent four more. Failing that: make EVERY game of the CFP a home game for someone, based on the high-to-low seeding above, and leave the neutral-site bowl games to the many other deserving teams across the nation.

Best way to watch: SKYCAST

ESPN seems to find new ways daily to turn off fans and observers, including me, but when I do watch games on the network, my favorite way is now SkyCast. If ESPN offers SkyCast for a game, it appears on one of the ESPN channels adjacent to the main broadcast. (As does Command Center, a multi-screen enhanced version of the main broadcast.) To reprise my X post, on SkyCast you get the best seats in the house. No ESPN broadcasters shilling for one team and telling you ‘who deserves to be there.’ Just you, the field announcer, and the roar of the crowd.