College football keeps changing — it happened again on Thursday.
After the first year of the 12-team playoff format, the 2025 College Football Playoff will feature a straight seeding format for the top squads as opposed to the previous campaign where four conference championship winners claimed the premier seeding with a first-round bye.
“After evaluating the first year of the 12-team playoff, the CFP Management Committee felt it was in the best interest of the game to make this adjustment,” executive director of the College Football Playoff Rich Clark said in a statement.
The Nittany Lions had one of, if not the most favorable draw in last year’s playoff. Despite losing the Big Ten championship to Oregon, Penn State was rewarded by having SMU and Boise State in its path to the College Football semifinal, who were arguably the two weakest teams in the field.
Oregon on the other hand didn’t have the same luck of the draw as Penn State. The Ducks’ first-round bye left them with a matchup with the soon-to-be national champions in Ohio State, which beat up on Dan Lanning’s team in a 41-21 Rose Bowl victory.
If the newly implemented seeding was in place last year, Penn State would’ve been the No. 4 seed, resulting in a first-round bye. It also meant the Nittany Lions would face the winner of Clemson vs. Notre Dame in the quarterfinal.
Penn State ultimately fell to the Fighting Irish in the semifinal with last year’s model, but the Tigers were arguably a stronger squad than both SMU and Boise State, led by quarterback Cade Klubnik, who’s in the conversation with Drew Allar as one of the top 2026 NFL Draft quarterbacks.
Oregon got screwed over by winning the Big Ten title, but it’s not like other conference-championship winners had any more luck as Arizona State, Georgia and Boise State joined the Ducks in losing their quarterfinal games.
Some of it you can chalk it up to luck of the draw, but the old format didn’t favor those that won the conference title, which is largely why straight seeding is being put in place.
“This change will continue to allow guaranteed access to the Playoff by rewarding teams for winning their conference championship, but it will also allow us to construct a postseason bracket that recognizes the best performance on the field during the entire regular season,” Clark said.
Not only does it benefit teams that win a conference championship, it benefits Power 4 schools with harder strength of schedules, namely the Big Ten and the SEC, as reports of the 2026 season’s format having 16 teams with both conferences getting four automatic qualifiers.
This in turn punishes the Group of Six conference champion as Boise State athletic director Jeramiah Dickey wrote on X saying the rule might as well be called the “Boise State policy.”
“When the system is created to keep you down, you fight like hell to break it,” Dickey said.
This new system also benefits Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish are independent, which Marcus Freeman and Co. take great pride in. There’s advantages to not playing a conference schedule, but there’s no longer the disadvantage of being ineligible for a first-round bye due to the inability of playing in a conference title game.
When Freeman and James Franklin sat a foot away from each other in their joint presser leading up to the Orange Bowl, the pair of coaches made their case. Freeman said it was part of the Notre Dame brand to be independent while Franklin said every team should be in a conference.
Franklin’s argument was there should be a need for “consistency” across college football. Now with the new format, Freeman’s comments don’t ring true anymore for the advantage that has been set up for Notre Dame.
“We know we can’t play in a championship game,” Freeman said. “We can’t have a first-round bye, but we continue to use not playing in Week 13 as our bye. And that’s the way we view it.”
The cliff notes is that this move benefits the top teams in the country, as it should’ve from the jump. It also creates an imbalance in power between the dominant conferences with futuristic changes in play with the potential 16-seed playoff.
The new model is another example of the ever-changing landscape of college football. Who knows what the format will look like a year from now, but in the meantime this is what’s in place.
It’s a moving target to figure out what’s best for college football with all the different pieces in play — just ask vice president for intercollegiate athletics Pat Kraft.
“I just think there’s a lot of things and nuances that may not be getting the attention,” Kraft said in February about the potential College Football Playoff expansion. “For us as practitioners and trying to operate this world, we need to better understand how that will work.”
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