The College Football Playoff's final four, the Miami Hurricanes, Ole Miss Rebels, Indiana Hoosiers, and Oregon Ducks, are a popular remaining field that has many excited about the quality of the remaining three games. There seems to be parity. Folks love the broken monotony of the Alabama Crimson Tide, Georgia Bulldogs, and Ohio State Buckeyes' eliminations. And the Texas Tech Red Raiders' loss after spending $28 million on their roster.
The trend of top-seeded teams losing their first matchups, with Indiana being the only one of eight top-four seeds that have not lost their first game over the past two years, could force massive changes to the sport for the 2026/2027 postseason, however.
NBC Sports' Nicole Auerbach reports that several options are on the table, some that would include expanding the field, some that wouldn't. Rich Clark, the Executive Director of the College Football Playoff, provided the intel.
"It’s possible that the powerbrokers who oversee the CFP make changes to the format and/or the schedule in response to this trend. They do have a few options, with or without actually expanding the field. If they stay with a 12-team bracket, they could start the whole Playoff a week earlier — the second weekend of December, the one typically reserved for the annual Army-Navy game — which would allow the CFP to get all four first-round games in without directly competing against the NFL, too. (The NFL cannot begin playing games on Saturdays until the third Saturday of December.) And if every round gets moved up, the top-four seeds would not have to wait more than three whole weeks to play again," Auerbach wrote.
"Moving up the start of the CFP by one week is 'not off the table,' executive director Rich Clark told NBC Sports last month. Clark said that the commissioners and presidents who oversee the CFP prefer to keep the current two-week break between conference championship games and the first round for players’ health and safety reasons, but that leaders 'will look at it and evaluate it as they do every year.'
"If those commissioners and presidents decide to expand the bracket to include 16 teams, the rust-versus-rest debate would likely come up there, too. The CFP would need to encroach on that second weekend of December for additional games at that point, and perhaps administrators would look at having the top seeds playing (and hosting) first-round games instead of using byes as part of the format.
"There’s another option, too. If the CFP really wanted to make sure its top seeds had every advantage, they could let them host quarterfinal games. First-round on-campus games have been great for the sport, and there’s already been a push from fans, coaches and athletic directors to put at least one more round on college campuses, too."
CFP selection committee likely tired of looking foolish
College Football is unpredictable. Certainly, those who are selecting the playoff seeds don't seem to have a pulse on which team actually deserves to be higher ranked. In fact, maybe there's more to that idea.
The CFP selection committee may be trying to change the rules for pride's sake. If they're getting things wrong, it must be because the process is wrong, right?
To be fair, the committee's members and leadership are everchanging, year in and year out, so these are changes being made from people who have to make any changes to justify their being in the seat in the first place.