12-team Playoff – Syndication Server

College Football Playoff Committee announces format for 12-team playoff: How could it look?

The College Football Playoff Committee announced the format for the expanded 12-team playoff. How would it have looked based on the final 2023 CFP rankings?

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?

Predicting which 12 teams will make the 2025 College Football Playoff

An early look at which 12 teams will likely be included in the first 12-team College Football Playoff ahead of the 2024 season.

It feels like an era came to an end on Monday night with the Michigan Wolverines’ 34-13 win over the Washington Huskies in the national championship game.

No longer will we have a four-team College Football Playoff. No longer will we have five power conferences dominating the landscape. Going forward, we have the 12-team playoff. Thanks to conference realignment, the Power Five has been whittled to essentially a Power Two: the SEC and the Big Ten. The ACC and Big 12 are working to keep pace.

It’s fair to say the 2024 college season will be the first of a new era. How long that era will last is to be determined, but the landscape will look far different this coming season.

For the purpose of this article, we want to look at the first year of the new expanded playoff, and try to project which teams we might see involved. At the moment, the format for the playoff is in question. Previously, the six highest-ranked conference champions would get in as automatic qualifiers, followed by the next six highest-ranked teams. That may change, now that there are no longer five power conferences, and it’s going to hard to justify giving an automatic qualifying spot to the winner of the Pac-12, which is down to two schools.

To work around that for the time being, though, we went forward using the 5-and-7 model, assuming an automatic qualifying spot would go to the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, the highest-ranked Group of Five conference champion. From there, the remaining seven teams would be decided by the rankings.

Here are the 12 teams I predict will make it into the inaugural expanded College Football Playoff.

12-Team Playoff: Ducks face new first-round opponent in hypothetical expanded playoff

The second official set of College Football Playoff rankings have been released, and at the top, there weren’t that many changes.

From No. 1 down to No. 8, all of the teams remained the same. After that, though, there was a bit of a shake-up, with the Oklahoma Sooners losing and the teams behind them moving up into the top 10.

[lawrence-related id=51574]

That’s all well and good, but we want to live in a hypothetical world. How would things look if the future 12-team playoff model was put into effect this season, with these rankings?

The 12-team model that was approved last year would include the six highest-ranked conference champions and six at-large teams, with the four highest-ranked conference champions seeded 1 through 4 and receiving first-round byes. The first-round games would be played on campus sites.

So with that system in mind, where would the Oregon Ducks stand after the release of the first official CFP rankings of the year? Take a look:

Note: In these matchups, we advanced Oregon through each game to show what their path would look like, while teams in other matchups were advanced based on who had the higher seed.

12-Team Playoff: Ducks’ path to championship in hypothetical expanded playoff

A look at what the Oregon Ducks’ path to the national championship would look like if the 12-team playoff were in place this season.

This is the final year of a 4-team College Football Playoff, and while we can enjoy the exclusivity it provides to the top teams in the sport, we can also dream of a world in which the 12-team playoff was already in place.

While the four-team model is relatively straightforward with the College Football Playoff selection committee picking the four teams who deserve to get in, the 12-team model comes with a bit more nuance.

So with that system in mind, where would the Oregon Ducks stand after the release of the first official CFP rankings of the year? Take a look:

Note: In these matchups, we advanced Oregon through each game to show what their path would look like, while teams in other matchups were advanced based on who had the higher seed.

What would the 12-team College Football Playoff field look like

How would the 12-team playoff field look with the initial rankings released on Tuesday?

On Tuesday evening the initial College Football Playoff rankings were revealed. The Alabama Crimson Tide is currently on the outside looking in at No. 6 behind the Michigan Wolverines at No. 5.

But how would the playoff field look if it was expanded to 12 teams? The new layout would create a bye week for the top four highest-ranked conference champions. Two more conference champions would join the field with six at-large bids.

How would those matchups look?