COLLEGE FOOTBALL WILL THRIVE WITH A 12-TEAM PLAYOFF, AS PARITY PROVES

Imagine if this season, the last of a generally predictable final four, were involved in 2024’s wildly expanded format, which has the deep interest of every broadcast entity known to humankind

     Ever see a nuisance so completely bonkers, rowdier than anything they put on signs during pregame shows? And watch it somehow settle down as sane? For now, anyway, conferences have finished realigning, NIL dollars are doled out, proclaimed coaches haven’t become their own transfer portals — and college football has won its gleaming bonanza from too many broadcast entities.

     How? Who, when and why? I’m not sure the league commissioners know what they’re doing. They just show up, stab another in the back, and win the butchery with b.s. But with no apologies to NBA boss Adam Silver, who doesn’t have the ratings or weekly rage, this remains the No. 2 sport in America for a variety of sensibilities. It includes a wild-guard of clock-immersed Saturday chaos, from Oklahoma outlasting Texas and USC holding off Arizona in triple overtime, along with a snippet of what’s happening next season.

     That’s when a 12-team expansion launches for the College Football Playoff. Anyone who thinks the current knockout system — allowing teams to beat each other in a three-month series of showdowns, leaving four or more for a selection committee to choose — doesn’t understand that the most exciting format has all playing at the end. The top six seeds will include the highest-ranked conference teams and six other at-large teams receiving bids. In past years, before the sport changed dramatically, we had an idea of who will win: Georgia, Alabama, LSU or Clemson have won the last eight times.

     The next eight years, we’ll have eight different champs. We need to seize this newfound equality by having difference-makers not in September and October and by making everything count in December and January. College football tends to fade away, as the NFL postseason starts, following the new year. Now it’s time to bring back the theater and let them take a bigger hold of the holidays and beyond.

     All you need to know: Every media outlet with billions on the brain — ESPN, Fox, CBS, NBC, Apple, Amazon and Warner Bros. Discovery — has voiced deep interest in the CFP. The contract is up in 2026, and if yikes is the biggest offering in your vocabulary, try another howler for a mass-network deal. Two billion annually?

     It might be worth it, by current standards. Already having seen enough this season, I say 10 teams can win it all. Why eliminate six when all are capable? At present, I could see Georgia winning an undermanned Southeastern Conference, Michigan winning the overmatched Big Ten, Florida State winning the Atlantic Coast Conference and Oregon winning the last call of the Pac-12. As top seeds, why not see how they fare later with Ohio State, Oklahoma, Washington, Penn State, Texas and Alabama possibly still in the mixture? The way it works, teams ranked from 5th through 12th play in first-round matchups on college campuses on a Friday and Saturday, Dec. 20 and 21. You don’t think that’s an immediate dandy on a sports scorecard? Alabama playing at the Horseshoe in Columbus? It’s never happened, especially four or five days before Christmas.

     I could see Oklahoma, Washington, Ohio State and Texas hosting first-round games. The winners move to the quarterfinals, in bowl settings, on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1. The semifinals, also in bowl settings, are on Jan. 9 and 10, a Thursday and Friday. Then the title game comes Jan. 20, a Monday. With so much on the national plate for weeks at a time, these games cannot miss. They currently miss much, with almost a month off, when people forget who’s playing and don’t care as much as the NFL playoffs line up.

     College football engineered this formula because of, naturally, money. It came with Oklahoma and Texas vanishing to the SEC, as commissioner Greg Sankey joined them for last weekend’s Red River Rivalry in Dallas, and a quartet of USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon off to the Big Ten — where new commissioner Tony Petitti should loom Saturday for the No. 7 Huskies’ tussle against the No. 8 Ducks in Seattle. This will be a monster game for the national standings, with the winner possibly advancing to the semifinals. If this were next season, there’s no reason each can’t belong in the final 12. What won’t happen this year is USC in the final four, where a no-defense mess will lose Saturday at Notre Dame before losing to Washington and Oregon later. Can Caleb Williams win another Heisman Trophy without a full team?

     If there were any histrionics on high, Georgia would face a school with NIL collective hangups. We have warfare across the world, calamity in government, and yet, Kentucky coach Mark Stoops blamed a 51-13 loss to the Bulldogs on a lack of financial support for his players. Just what you want donors to do these days, reach down and pay a tight end.

     “I can promise you — Georgia, they bought some pretty good players," Stoops said to a rankled fan on his radio show. "You're allowed to these days, and we could use some help. That's what they look like, you know what I mean, when you have 85 of ‘em. I encourage anybody that's disgruntled to pony up some more.”

     As the coach of back-to-back national champion Georgia, Kirby Smart didn’t have much to say. “No reaction. It's much to do about nothing,” he said. “I think Mark is trying to garner interest for money from his fan base for his collective, and we're all trying to do the same in terms of trying to get money for the collective. Mark and I talked about NIL pregame, and we talked about it in our meeting. I'm not biting on that.”

     One school has a frenzied John Calipari running the basketball program. The other school has a forgotten basketball program. As Stoops noted Wednesday, “Kirby’s probably happy. He’s probably trying to rally up more money, too. We all need it — it’s just the way it is.”

     The schools with the richest and football-proudest alumni, or Deion Sanders in the house, have the collectives in place. But the NIL demands will bring down the ideal of a dynasty. Either that or a coach like Miami’s Mario Cristobal, who didn’t take a knee that would have closed out a win and lost to Georgia Tech. For now, the watchword comes from the new athletic director at Washington, Troy Dannen, who said, “If budgets won championships, Ohio State and Texas would win everything — and they haven't won much lately.”

     You want Georgia, Alabama, LSU and Clemson?

     I’ll take the field, for a change.

###

     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.