Brian Kelly reveals what's different about season with expanded 12-team College Football Playoff

LSU is hosting Alabama Saturday night in a game that many have deemed to be a College Football Playoff elimination game. This is the first year of the 12-team playoff or both teams would likely already be out of contention. LSU head coach Brian Kelly joined The Pat McAfee Show on Friday and shared his thoughts on the new playoff format.

Kelly loves that so many teams are still in contention to reach the 12-team College Football Playoff.

“There’s so many teams that are still part of this now going later into October. I remember when the shows first started talking about the teams, there would really only be about 8 or 10 teams that really had a chance,” Brian Kelly said. “Now there’s 20-25 teams that really have a chance. I think it’s good for college football.”

While Kelly is pleased with the new postseason format, he acknowledged that there are still plenty of challenges for coaches, with arguably the biggest one being cell phones.

LSU players are well aware that the LSU-Alabama game is being built up as an elimination game, and there are plenty of other talking points that can be distracting as well.

“I think what’s been hard for coaching across the board is there’s so many distractions now, that just keeping your team locked in to week-to-week is hard enough,” Brian Kelly said. “So they hear all of these shows. They hear all of the information that’s out there. So it’s really been about eliminating distractions from week-to-week.”

Kelly added that there might need to be some tweaks to the way the rankings are done, but overall he feels good about the future of the sport.

“I think the first year there’s going to be a little bit of, ‘OK, that’s the way it’s going to go this year.’ But moving forward I think we’re all going to learn from this first year and I think you might see strength of schedule might play a bigger role moving forward, who you play, versus who you didn’t play. That’s going to play a role in it,” Kelly said.

“But I think we’re going to get through the first year and hammer down maybe a little bit better on who those 12 teams should be.”