Greg McElroy on College Football Playoff: 'We didn't need to go to 12'

Now that we have the first results of the expanded playoff at a dozen teams, Greg McElroy wonders if we overestimated the number of berths.

McElroy spoke about the 12-team format of the College Football Playoff on ‘Always College Football’ on Monday. Since the expansion was always about letting in the teams who just missed out on the four-team field, he wonders why we tripled the playoff rather than just doubling it considering who can actually win a national title from five through twelve in the bracket.

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“The other thing I’d say is we probably didn’t need to go to 12, right,” said McElory. “We didn’t need to go to 12 because, let’s just be real. Is this 12-team playoff really about teams nine, ten, eleven, and twelve? Like, how many people really thought teams nine, ten, eleven, and twelve were going to go and potentially win the national championship? It wasn’t about teams nine through twelve.”

“This expansion was about teams five through eight,” McElroy continued. “It’s about the teams that couldn’t quite get in the door of the four-team format so now they have another opportunity to play their way in to the four-team playoff with a victory in the quarterfinals.”

That point played out to an extent in how the opening round went in the CFP. All four home teams, the higher-seeded at-larges, won over the three lower-seeded at-larges and the final conference champion by an average margin of 19.3 points and posted their largest leads at an average of 28 in those games. Notre Dame started it off with a win over Indiana that was much larger than 27-17, the closest margin of the weekend, would suggest. Penn State then won by 28 over SMU, Texas won by 14 over Clemson in a closer game in the fourth quarter, but then Ohio State won by 25 over Tennessee.

With that, the four teams who would have been in had the field been eight instead of twelve in the first place in the Longhorns, Nittany Lions, Fighting Irish, and Buckeyes will all advance, and advance handily, anyways in a chalk outcome.

There will be all kinds of debate to be had about the playoff and how it’s formatted now that we have actual results from one that’s finally expanded. However, with how many contenders he sees, McElroy thinks it’d be alright at eight instead of where it is now or any more in the future.

“It’s really always been about five, six, seven, and eight. So, I ask the question. Was going to 12 necessary? Or would, you know, going to eight be more than enough?” McElroy asked. “I’m not sure I know the answer to that.”