In case you missed the news this week, the College Football Playoff is contemplating expanding to a 12-team model as early as 2023. There’s still a lot of work to do, and it has to be approved, but it sure feels like this train is steaming out of the station to the next expansion destination.
Ohio State has been a fixture in the playoff since the inaugural season of 2014, winning the first-ever CFP and being a part of all the fun of the four-team format five out of eight years so far.
But what if the CFP was a 12-team affair to begin with? Where would Ohio state have been each year from 2014 through last season? Would it have been included in every year? What would the seeding have been, and what teams would the Buckeyes have potentially matched up with?
We are here to answer all of those questions. But first, let’s get some things out of the way. We’re going through this exercise with the understanding that things will look similar to the chatter we’ve heard if it becomes reality. That means the highest-ranked top-four conference champions get seeded one through four, with each receiving a first-round bye. It also means that we’ll be using the final regular-season College Football Playoff Rankings as our guide as well.
All of that aside, let’s get after it. Here is what everything would look like if the College Football Playoff were actually a playoff and not an “and-one” we’ve all been fooled into believing was more than it was.