By: Colin Lacy

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

Just into the change of the calendar from 2024 to 2025, the first 12-team College Football Playoff has completed the first two rounds of the bracket.

Not that it surprises many folks, but the playoff format is already drawing grumblings from college football coaches, media, and fans alike.

Now that we’ve seen the first round, on-campus sites, and the quarterfinals round in four of the New Years Six Games, what have we learned and where should this go in the future?

To find out what we’ve learned, we must look back and see how we got here. The birth of the College Football Playoff began for the 2014 season and was formed as a four-team playoff for the National Championship until this season (2024) when the expansion to 12-teams took effect.

The expansion talks have been just that since the inception of the CFP but took some weight when an internal working group of ADs, Commissioners and former coaches/players was put into place in June of 2021.

That group was tasked with exploring what a format of an expanded playoff would look like in the future.

Fast forward a year and a half to December of 2022, the CFP Board of Managers unanimously agrees to implement the 12-team playoff beginning in the 2024 and 2025 seasons.

The part that severely went unnoticed in the expediency of the format change is that the working group was given a target date of beginning the format in the 2025 season.

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, who was in that working group, has publicly said that when the start date was moved up a full year, they knew there were going to be some bugs that needed to be worked out.

So, what are those bugs that have reared their ugly head so far through eight games in the CFP?

Going into the first round, outside of fans in Tuscaloosa and an SEC Head Coach that calls Oxford, Mississippi home, the majority of fans and media do not have many bones to pick with the 12-teams that are in the playoff, but questions have been raised about the selection process after the opening round.

Getting through the first round of on-campus hosted games felt like a chore with only one game ending within ten points. No matter the format, no matter the number of teams, and even with a flawless system there are always going to be conversations of “snubs” or “non-deserving” teams, so that’s not the elephant in the room.

The biggest issue we have with the current 12-team format is the seeding.

One of the cornerstones of this format was the emphasis on Conference Champions that would have the five highest rated conference champions in the final CFP rankings would automatically earn a spot in the field, and the four highest would earn a top four seed.

This year that plays out as the Big 10 Champion Oregon receiving the #1 seed, SEC Champion Georgia earning the #2 Seed, the Mountain West Champ Boise State as the #3 seed as the group of five representative, and Big 12 Winner Arizona State rounding out the group with first round byes as the #4 seed.  The ACC champion Clemson was the 5^th highest ranked conference champ and rounded out the field as the #12 seed.

The big rub has been the seeding of the conference champions with Boise State and Arizona State, while being deserving of being in the field due to winning their conference, a first round bye (which turns out didn’t fair so well for any of the four that earned it this year) shouldn’t have been in the cards for the Broncos or Sun Devils.

Discussions have already started at the top (SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey seems to always have that kind of pull) in order to not only change the seeding but also begin developing a system to re-seed after each round.

I suspect that even possibly as early as next year, we see the five highest ranked conference champions receive a slot in the 12-team playoff but are not guaranteed a top 4 seed and first round bye.

After this first cycle of the playoff that runs with the contract that runs out after the 2025 season playoffs, do not be surprised to see re-seeding come into play after each round similar to the NFL playoffs. This would put the highest remaining seed after each round facing the lowest remaining seed and so on.

At the end of the day, this process was rushed to get it online and while it is turned into a couple enticing games and fantastic environments for the first ever on-campus playoff games, there are still changes to be made to get it where it needs to be.

My biggest concern in the process is the impatience of folks forcing the hand to expand to 16 or beyond before the kinks are fully worked out with the 12-team format. Only time will tell.