College Football Playoff expansion appears inevitable.
The question, of course, is by how many teams the field might expand. The Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 have indicated their preference to double the field from 12 teams to 24, while the SEC remains firm on 16.
This year’s field is set at 12; any expansion wouldn’t occur until 2027, and must be finalized by Dec. 1 this year.
In the spirit of this discussion, I wanted to look back at the first 12 seasons of the College Football Playoff era and examine how things might have been different for Washington with a 24-team field.
In line with much of the reporting about a potential 24-team field, I’ll make a few key assumptions with my analysis here, even if much remains undecided: that it would be an all at-large field, with the only exception being an automatic bid for the highest-ranked team from a Group of 6 conference; that the top eight teams would receive byes; and that first- and second-round games would be played on campuses.
So in the first round, while the top eight seeds sit at home, you’d have the following games played on campuses (second round in parentheses):
No. 24 at No. 9 (winner plays at No. 8)
No. 23 at No. 10 (winner plays at No. 7)
No. 22 at No. 11 (winner plays at No. 6)
No. 21 at No. 12 (winner plays at No. 5)
No. 20 at No. 13 (winner plays at No. 4)
No. 19 at No. 14 (winner plays at No. 3)
No. 18 at No. 15 (winner plays at No. 2)
No. 17 at No. 16 (winner plays at No. 1)
While the assumption also is that 24-team expansion would mean eliminating conference championship games, for simplicity’s sake I’m still going to use the final CFP rankings for each season, rather than the penultimate ranking before conference-title games were played. The particulars of any 24-team format are fuzzy enough, anyway, that we don’t need to get too rigid about how we apply the rankings to this hypothetical exercise.
No doubt, this isn’t a one-to-one comparison for exactly how each season would have unfolded in the 24-team era, because coaches surely would have made different decisions with different outcomes at stake (i.e. resting players in late-season games, one of the primary arguments against this format). And it probably would be naive to assume the committee would have seeded every team exactly the same, knowing 24 teams were advancing instead of four or 12.
This isn’t an argument for or against the idea of a 24-team field (online polling suggests fans mostly hate it). But it hopefully puts into context how this kind of expansion might have changed the season for a handful of recent UW teams — either positively or negatively, depending on your point of view.
Let's go year by year, beginning with 2014 and the advent of the CFP: