Breaking down how 12-team CFP field improves regular-season product

For the last 10 years, there was a thin margin of error for teams to make the College Football Playoff. With just four teams in the field, the path to a national championship required a strong resume when it came time for the committee to put together its final Top 25 rankings.

Starting this season, it’s all changing. The CFP will move to 12 teams, with the five highest-ranked conference champions making the field along with the next seven highest-ranked teams. Suddenly, there’s a new path to the title game – and as more teams are going to be in the mix, fans will have to retrain their brains.

“I had somebody, when that bracket came out on Twitter, was like, ‘Six or seven of these teams are gonna be out of this by Halloween.’ And I’m like, not possible,” On3’s Andy Staples said on Andy Staples On3. “Because there’s, like, 30 teams that are in it to start the season. And then, there are gonna be some surprises that show up along the way.”

Since the CFP came to be in 2014, eight teams made multiple appearances while seven played in it once. Those numbers are sure to go up under the 12-team model, which opens the door for more games with Playoff implications late in the year.

That was the goal when expanding the CFP came to be, according to The Athletic’s Max Olson, who recalled a conversation with former Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby about that very subject.

“I remember talking with Bob Bowlsby when they came up with this plan, and they believed – they’d done the homework – and they truly believed there was going to be 30 to 40 teams that were in contention at the start of November with this format,” Olson said. “Now, obviously, conference realignment and all that stuff plays into what we have today. But they absolutely believe that there’s going to be way more teams that matter. That when you look at the playoff ranking, 13 to 25 is really going to matter. The perception of all the teams that are not going to be playing a conference title game is really going to matter.

“I can’t wait. You can you can argue whether it’s for the greater good. I think it is. I think it makes way more games matter in October or November.”

How 2-loss teams can stay in the CFP discussion

In the 10-year history of the four-team College Football Playoff, no team made the field with two losses. That meant, as the year went along, teams with two losses fell out of the CFP conversation on the national scale.

With 12 teams now making it, that will shift. In the process, games will matter more as teams try to steal a spot in the CFP late in the year. Those two-loss programs will stay in the national spotlight with more wiggle room.

As for “eliminating” those teams, Olson said those talking points will fade away.

“On the national media side, we’ve kind of gotten bad about this where the four-team playoff creates this like thing … where it’s like, ‘Okay, they lost two games. We can stop talking about them now.’ And that’s just not going to be the case with this season,” Olson said.

“There’s just not going to be these teams that you are eliminating and saying, ‘I don’t have to tune into this game because they’re not playing for something.’ They all are.”