Speaking of incentivizing teams to try, the very format you spent years demanding has resulted in the head coach of Ohio State openly admitting they are not going to try in the regular season but will “turn up the gas” in the Playoff
Yeah, I think this is the key issue: the playoff format has to preserve the incentive for teams to actually try.
For decades, “making a bowl” mattered. For a lot of programs, especially when the bigger bowls still had real weight, that was a meaningful goal. But the Playoff era has de-emphasized bowls, and now the thing serious programs are judged on is increasingly simple: did you make the CFP?
That matters because the sport has changed. NIL/revenue sharing has created a world where more teams can compete above board for players they previously had little realistic chance to land. We will soon have 40 or so programs spending $30M on football rosters. If only 12 of them can make the thing that now defines success, then most of the teams actually trying are starting every season with a very narrow path to even the minimum acceptable outcome.
That’s where a 24-team format makes sense. Because it accounts for where the sport is going and where parts of it already are right now.
It doesn’t mean everyone trying to compete gets in. But it does mean the postseason has some reasonable relationship to the size of the group actually investing and trying to matter.
If the number of teams competing continues to outgrow the field at the rate at which it is, you risk a lot of fanbases and programs eventually feeling like, “No matter what we do, it’s probably not enough.” That breeds apathy. And it would be a shame to create that feeling right as more teams than ever finally have a real chance to compete if they execute.