The arrival of the 12-team College Football Playoff in 2024 ought to create big changes for the sport of college football.
The sport will ask teams to not only play a 12-game regular season and a conference championship game, but now a three- or four-game playoff sequence. This means a team will probably have to play 16 games, possibly 17, to win the national championship. That’s an NFL-level workload on college football players. It’s frankly too much.
We also have to deal with the reality of the transfer portal and the coaching carousel in December. Bowl opt-outs have watered down the bowl product, though the 12-team playoff will obviously make more bowl games elite events, which is a small-scale solution to a much bigger problem.
College football has a lot of reorganizing to do. Let’s go through the various steps the sport must take to adjust to the 12-team playoff era: