Honestly, I could just leave it at the title, but you guys come here for more than just snappy headlines, so let’s go over my philosophical objections to the colossally dumb 24-team College Football Playoff that reportedly is all but locked in for 2027, and also why the new format probably helps Notre Dame.

Why the format helps Notre Dame

Worth noting, Pete Bevacqua had already expressed his favor of a 24-team playoff before the format became essentially finalized – though after it became all but a formality thanks to everyone else but the SEC being on board by then – and was a key part of getting it completed. (He was reported to be one of the three stakeholders talking to ESPN about it in its final stages, and the other two all but run the playoff.) Marcus Freeman has also spoken in favor of the pending change.

You can see why: There are two very obvious benefits to Notre Dame (well, one for sure and one theoretical) with the expansion of the playoff to 24 teams. The format will include the elimination of conference championship games and the in-practice elimination of automatic bids* outside of one to the highest-ranked Group of 6 team. It will see the current conference championship weekend turned into a bye week, followed by first-round games the following week – likely in the middle of the week, because of course – and the second round staged the week we saw the first round played in 2024, ’25 and ’26.

* The power conferences all still have an automatic bid, but now that everyone is playing 9 conference games and the championship game is being eliminated, it is essentially impossible for one of those leagues to produce a champion bad enough to be out of the top 24 anyway.

The first benefit is, as we saw last year and as I fear we may yet see again, the Irish cannot count on a spot in the current iteration of college football’s postseason if they go merely 10-2, whereas with a 24-team format they are basically a lock at 9-3 or better and could get in the field at 8-4 sometimes as well. (If the final 2022 CFP rankings were put into a 24-team field, the Drew Pyne team that lost to Marshall and Stanford would have gotten in, which seems like a mic-drop argument against implementing that format, but whatever.) With 19 at-large spots now instead of 7, the likelihood of conference-based politicking that we saw a year ago, at least as it pertains to Notre Dame, diminishes.

The second benefit, and the theoretical one, is that it should become less difficult for Notre Dame to secure a competitive schedule. Now, this was supposedly a reason to expand to 12 teams, too, and that almost immediately was proven wildly wrong. I am skeptical for that reason, and also because B1G commissioner Tony Petitti, the scum-sucking demon who originally pushed forth a version of this format, has yet to formalize the Power 4 non-conference scheduling requirement that he says he will enact once this thing becomes official. The last time someone made a deal with the B1G that didn’t include enforceable provisions, it didn’t work out so well for anyone except for the B1G.

But let’s say for a moment that Petitti isn’t lying about that (even though it would be about the first time he hasn’t lied about something since taking his current job). Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger did report as the 24-team format was accelerating earlier this month that as part of the expansion, Notre Dame is expecting to be able to schedule more games against teams from the SEC and the B1G. A report in The Athletic last month dropped the interesting nugget that were the 24-team format to come to be, the B1G and Notre Dame specifically had mutual interest in some form of scheduling arrangement guaranteeing some number of annual games between the parties. (That report came out less than a week before a future ND/Nebraska series, which notably will take place during the B1G season – perish the thought, Southern Cal – was announced, so that got my attention.)

If that’s true – and there are rumors flying around about an ND/Oregon matchup in LA next season, so we may not have long to find some evidence – then the 24-team playoff, horrible as it is, might accidentally produce some decent results.

Why the format is stupid

I mean, what can I say about this that so many others haven’t already said?

The 24-team format is lunacy for a thousand different reasons. Most notably, it transforms the regular season into what amounts to a 12-game preseason for a whole bunch of teams, Notre Dame included. Hell, the current 12-team format basically already did that for the cream of the crop, such as Ohio State and Georgia. With 24 teams, you can add the Irish to that in most years, as well as probably 5-6 more teams. It is essentially impossible for the top teams to lose enough times to fall out of contention, especially in this new world where the moneyed folks can buy their way out of any recruiting misfire.

The elimination of conference championship games and, for all practical purposes, all bowl games (some will probably continue being played for now, but functionally speaking the idea is dead) is not that big a deal to me. Well, except that it’s very funny that the power conferences took all the biggest complaints people have had about Notre Dame over the years – the lack of a conference title game, the preferential bowl treatment, and what’s perceived as an indifference to playing in bowl games they deem beneath them – and took a giant blowtorch to all of them at once, proving none of these so-called traditions actually meant a thing to them if they could make some more money from trashing them.

That said, even though the title games were shameless money grabs and, in the 12-team format, largely all but meaningless (except for when one of their outcomes probably knocked the Irish out of the playoff – yes, still bitter), they still (usually) matched two good teams against each other, and they still drew high ratings. In the case of the SEC and B1G, in fact, those ratings were probably higher than those of any of the first-round playoff games that will replace them. And the reported windfall for eliminating these title games and replacing them with more playoff games appears to basically be a rounding error ($150 million per year, split among all parties involved).

The future

The whole idea behind this change, according to most of the people making it, is hope. Apparently replacing a ReliaQuest Bowl berth with a first-round playoff loss will suddenly mollify the people financing college football rosters and slow down the coaching carousel. Good luck with that. The first year of the playoff saw Penn State get to the semifinals, and their coach was fired the following October. This stuff will continue to happen.

None of this is even getting into the scheduling nightmare we’re headed for. Apparently we’re going to continue to see weekday playoff games to avoid the NFL, more than we were already getting. ESPN, which retained exclusive playoff broadcasting rights (yet another supposed reason to do this off the board), will be sublicensing a bunch of the games out, so casual fans, the people this is aimed at, aren’t going to be able to easily find the games. So that part is going to be fun too.

I can’t adequately explain how dumb this all is. We’re making a playoff bid no longer an accomplishment but a formality for any team remotely worth a damn, devaluing hundreds of regular-season games to add stakes in name only to a bunch of games no one was watching or will watch anyway, and antagonizing college football fans who have in large part loudly stated they don’t want this. None of this is good! And yet we’re getting it anyway.