A Year to Remember in College Football

Illustration by Anika Ata

This year's college football playoff season was one for the ages. Starting this year, the NCAA decided to make the playoffs a twelve team bracket. The 2024-2025 season, having just wrapped up, has started chatter about whether or not people liked the twelve team playoff. Despite overwhelming controversy, I loved it. This extended format gave us avid football fans an extra few weeks of high quality football games. That being said, many people did not enjoy the new structure due to the belief that it should just be the four best teams that compete in the end, which is a fair argument when you see the seventh and eighth seeds battling it out in the championship. Although the championship was a great game ending in a score of 34-23 with Ohio State winning it all, many people criticized the NCAA as they believe the championship should be the two best teams, not two teams that upset a high seed and then cruise into the championship. Last year, all the playoff teams had a record higher than 12-2; however, this year a team that was 10-4 made the playoffs. Football fans are left questioning if it is better to only have two high quality games containing the four best teams in college football, or twelve brackets containing other solid teams which could leave room for blowout games. If I were able to make decisions about the playoffs with the NCAA, I would make the playoffs into an eight team bracket playoff instead of a twelve team bracket. Another option could be to make it so that the top eight schools–based solely on record and strength of wins–would make this playoff; if this was in place this year, we would have seen Ohio State, Boise State, Arizona State, Notre Dame, Oregon, Penn State, Texas, and Georgia. Additionally, I would make it so that the matchups are made at random and not correlated to your seed, which would spice things up and hopefully make the games more competitive. Finally, I would make it so that Bowl Games count for your team's record the next year so that we would see even more teams have even more competitive games. College Football over the past few years has been evolving and it will be interesting to see what other changes will take place in the foreseeable future.

Oliver Gates