Now that we're outside the blast radius of College Football Playoff hot takes, let's pause for a breath. Yes, the two G5 games were every bit the blowouts everyone expected. Yes, Notre Dame or Vanderbilt or Texas almost surely would have put up a better fight than Tulane and James Madison.
Whatever your playoff argument was heading into the first round, it's now invalid given that we have eight blue-chip teams, most of them old-school, blue-blood programs, up and down the CFP bracket. And between all the machinations among conferences and networks, and the fawning love for Notre Dame, it's obvious that the future of the CFP has little room reserved for any program that doesn't fit either the big-conference or legacy-brand designations.
So with a few days of breathing room before the spicy Rose/Sugar/Orange/Cotton takes, let's ask a question we probably should've been asking a long time ago:
What exactly is the point of a playoff in the first place?
The answer is not quite as simple as it seems. Let's get a little philosophical here: Is a playoff's purpose to crown a season's best team? Because if that's the case, we already know who it is for 2025: Indiana, the only FBS team to finish undefeated at 13-0. If you want to go matching Indiana up with teams in Division II or III that finished undefeated — and there were several — you could, but that would probably qualify as cruel and unusual punishment.
Or is a playoff's purpose to give the best X number of teams a second chance to win the title — effectively, a second season on top of the regular one?Nice little regular season you've got there, Indiana! Your reward: three more games to prove you're worthy!
(The real answer to the "why playoffs?" question, especially expanded ones, is money. Playoffs generate ungodly gobs of revenue for conferences, schools and broadcast partners. It's why postseason play takes up an ever-larger share of the calendar. If, say, Alabama were to win the national championship, nearly a third of its games — five of 17 — will have been postseason ones. Know what that sounds like to the institutions profiting off the playoff? A good start. But we digress.)
We've all collectively decided that the postseason — a party where only the cool kids are invited — is the way we wish to crown our champions. Yes, it's more dramatic, hence the increased viewership. But it also tamps down the need for consistent regular-season excellence. Every team with one loss gets into the playoffs, quite a few teams with two losses get in, and this year one withthreelosses made the grade.
Contrast that with, say, the English Premier League, which crowns a champion based not on the playoff, but on a season-long run of elite-level play. That could lead to a future champion building an inexorable lead, but it also gives every single match day throughout the entire season an extra sheen of importance. (Side note: SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has long eyed the Premier League — a consortium of only the most popular, profitable clubs — with great interest, for reasons you can probably guess. The Premier League's ability to garner the vast majority of soccer-related revenue in England surely intrigues certain CFB powers, but the no-playoffs system and relegation for season-long losers probably don't hold the same interest.)
Or, if soccer's not your thing, look a little closer to home, deep in the heart of SEC country. For decades, NASCAR crowned champions like Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt with a season-long, no-playoff battle. Then, in 2004, NASCAR decided to implement a playoff system that, again, selected a small percentage of the overall field to race for the title. The system jacked up the drama for each playoff race, but also increased the likelihood that a driver could get hot at just the right moment and win the championship despite a lackluster regular season. For this reason — among many others — fans and drivers alike have complained about the NASCAR playoffs literally since their inception.
Clearly, American college football fans — and those making money off those fans — aren't going to accept that kind of structure, not when there are profitable games to be played. Not when you can get more than one bite at that championship apple, when a loss in August or September can't keep hurting you in January.
The fundamental problem here is that everyone's gotten a taste of the postseason, and everyone wants in on the action. We've lost sight of the fact that in sports, there are few winners and many losers. More often than not, your team will be among the losers. But many of the loudest voices in college football — like other arenas in this country — have decided that accepting thatsometimes you just loseis, well, loser behavior.
So we'll just go on giving chance after chance for losers to win, expanding the field from 2 to 4 to 12 to 16, until the entire season is nothing but playoffs, until every game is a playoff game, until there's only one team remaining without a loss.
You know, like 2025 regular season Indiana.
