Bigger! Better! Or Worser!

Aaand the NCAA's 12-team playoff is under way

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In addition to everything else, like UCLA playing in the Big Ten or Oklahoma now being part of the SEC’s food chain, we won’t be processing college football’s 2024 national championship the way we once did.

We’ll try not to overreact. After all, change is inherent. We only crowned a national champ the “old way” for a few years before this. And if you’re of a certain age, by which I mean you can read all the words in this post without darting away for a few minutes because you need a quick Insta hit, you can recall the old-old ways, which both sucked and blew.

Remember those? Teams would play all their games, including their bowl game, and then some voters — maybe some coaches, maybe some teams’ PR guys, some writers, a few other associated folks — would cast votes. The team with the highest vote total was the national champion and got to raise a trophy and all that rot.

That went on interminably, but we accepted it because, you know, whatever. Then, in the late 1990s, college football’s power brokers tried to incorporate both standard rankings and computer software to determine the top two teams in the country, and they’d play for all the marbles.

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That was the Bowl Championship Series, or BCS. It stunk for different reasons. About a decade ago, we shifted from the top-two deal to a four-team knockout tournament, but since the schools that were left out of the Top 4 generally whined their heads off every single December, it was determined that a much larger pool of title candidates ought to be drawn. Also, $.

So here we are, in 2024, launching yet another attempt at claiming that a single college football team can be identified as the best in all of the kingdom. This one is called the College Football Playoff, not the most original name, seeing as the four-team thingy that ran for the past decade was called the same thing.

That aside, here are your ground rules:

—Twelve teams, obviously.

—A 13-person committee (some former ADs, some former coaches and players) determines the delicious dozen, ranking the Top 25 every week from Nov. 5 to Dec. 8.

—The champions of the four top-ranked conferences earn seeds 1 through 4, and get a precious first-round bye.

—The five highest-ranked conferences overall are guaranteed at least one berth.

—Notre Dame can’t be a Top 4 seed and receive a bye. Ha ha! Notre Dame is an independent in football. Sorry, Irish.

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Now the good stuff. After conference championships get played, the CFP Playoff begins with the first round on the weekend before Christmas — and all of those games happen at the higher seed’s own stadium, which is very cool.

The quarterfinals and both semifinal games are spread among the current New Year’s Six bowls: Rose, Cotton, Orange, Sugar, Fiesta, Peach. And if the higher seed historically has gone to a certain bowl — say, Alabama in the Sugar — that’s where they’ll be slotted for these rounds.

The finals move around. This season, the CFP championship will go off on Jan. 20, 2025, at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, about which it’ll be big.

Now, is this all enough to quell arguments about the best team? You’d think that going 12 deep would get the job done, but we can only wait and watch. It adds a few weeks to the schedule, to be sure, and some teams could wind up playing 16 or 17 games, just like the pros.

These games are going to be worth a lot of money, which is the whole point of the deal. But as soon as an outlier — I don’t know, a 10-seed out of the SEC or something — races through and wins it all, the subject will arise anew. If 12 is good, isn’t 14 better?

Is it? Who knows? All we can say for sure is that a 14-team bracket has already been proposed. We haven’t even done the dozen yet.

Expand to infinity: It’s the only model for college football that has stood the test of time.