The College Football Playoff is expanding to 12 teams in 2024. However, it hadn’t yet been settled how the 12 teams would be selected.
On Tuesday, the College Football Playoff Committee announced a 5+7 model for selecting the 12 teams that will vie for the national championship through the expanded playoff. This is a change from the originally agreed upon 6+6 model that included the six highest-ranked conference champions. This comes after the Pac-12 was reduced to just Oregon State and Washington State after the latest round of realignment.
The assumption is the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC will receive four of those five automatic bids and the other could come from the Pac-12 or a Group of Five conference.
The five highest-ranked conference champions will receive automatic bids. The four highest-ranked conference champions will receive a first-round bye, with seeds 5-12 facing each other at the home venues of seeds 5-8.
According to a release from the College Football Playoff Committee, the quarterfinals and semifinal games will be played at the sites of the New Year’s Six bowl venues. The national title game will continue to be played at a neutral site.
Though there will be automatic qualifiers, no conference is guaranteed a spot in the playoff and there are no limitations on the number of teams each conference can send to the playoff. Why does this caveat matter? Well, the Pac-12 is now the Pac-2, with only Oregon State and Washington State remaining. Their schedule may not warrant consideration for an automatic bid in the playoff if they aren’t one of the top five conference champions.
Conversely, the SEC, which is arguably the most competitive conference, had four teams ranked in the top 12 of the final College Football Playoff rankings for 2023. Throw Oklahoma and Texas into the mix and that’s six programs that will play football in 2024 from the SEC in the top 12 with LSU at No. 13. What will make up the Big Ten in 2024 had five teams inside the top 12.
So what would the 2023 [autotag]College Football Playoff[/autotag] field look like if it had been a 12-team playoff?