After watching Ohio State University beat Notre Dame on Monday, I felt somewhat confused. How — after a supposedly improved playoff structure — did the No. 7 and No. 8 seeds make it to the National Championship game, and why were they not ranked higher?
In the first year of college football’s new 12 team playoff format, it felt like not much had changed, and — if anything — the field had become less competitive as a result of expanding it. Then turning to the NFL, I realized that both levels of the sport seem to share the same issue.
Since expanding their playoffs to feature 14 teams, the new seventh-seed teams in the NFL have gone 1-9 in the playoffs, with that lone win being the Packers walloping of an unsurprisingly fraudulent Cowboys team.
Both of these format expansions weren’t really necessary. It’s not like people had stopped watching football, the expansions were only motivated by one thing — money.
The more playoff games there are, the more money the leagues make. At the same time, these games can generate revenue while also staying competitive, and that requires taking a long look at conference and division success being prioritized over overall win-loss record.
In college football and the NFL, the top four seeds of the playoffs are determined first by which teams won their division and what their record was, then the remaining three teams are determined only by record. At the NFL level, this has led to weak division winners having a far worse record than the team they are facing in the wild card.
At the college level, the four conference champions with the best records get the four top seeds in the playoffs and a bye week, while the fifth conference champion gets either the No. 5 or the No. 12 seed depending on their seeding before the playoffs. In the inaugural year of this format, all conference champions were knocked out in the first game they played.
Both of these gimmicky forms of seeding have led to teams being left out of the playoffs despite a solid record due to not receiving some form of conference preference to put them in the dance.
Before I draw the ire of college football fans, I know this format is better than any format that has come before — case in point the SEC dominated four team format — but that doesn’t mean it can’t improve more.
Another smaller factor that could be pointed to is bye weeks, at least at the college level. While it is unclear if bye weeks are truly a deciding factor in which team will win a playoff game, seeing teams with bye weeks go 0-4 in the college football playoffs didn’t give the impression that a long period of rest was helpful for team success. Rather, it appears that teams without a bye week are able to find more success due to having an extra game to build momentum.
So, how could the format of the playoffs improve? By ripping off the playoff formats employed by college basketball and the NBA.
First, on the college front, I’m not advocating for a 64-team bracket akin to March Madness, but rather only a quarter of their bracket at 16 teams. After conference championships are done, voters get into a room and determine hands down who the best 16 teams are independent of their conference wins, and those teams get into the playoffs.
From there, seeding stays unchanged, and the bracket stays static — meaning the No. 1 seed won’t play the worst remaining team after its first win, but instead whoever feeds into their part of the quarterfinal bracket.
This format helps to ensure that talented teams with solid records aren’t left out of the playoffs just because of how their conference shook out, and would most likely lead to fewer blowout losses in earlier rounds of the playoffs.
Now, on the side of the NFL, I think they could feasibly add an eighth seed to the playoffs similar to the NBA. Right off the bat, what I will say is they should not have something like the play-in tournament the NBA uses to determine the No. 7 and No. 8 seeds. This is because the NBA’s much longer season makes records much closer between those playoff eligible teams while in the NFL there is commonly a staggering difference between the No. 1 seed and what would be the eighth-seeded team in the league.
While I did mention earlier that seven-seeded teams are so far only 1-9 in the league’s new playoff model, the addition of a No. 8 seed along with a static bracket would make for more upsets around the league over the course of the playoffs.
The other big change with this bracket would be that the seeding of teams would be solely determined by win-loss record. In all likelihood, this focus on win-loss record and eight teams would have included two teams this year that could have wreaked some havoc — a surging Bengals team along with the Falcons team that gave Jayden Daniels’ Commanders a run for their money.
Change of the norm will always face opposition, and that is especially true in the case of playoff formats for any sport. In college football and the NFL, the current formats just aren’t that good. With a few tweaks and a focus solely on team success through win-loss record, I think there will ultimately be fewer blowouts to start the playoffs and more competitive matches as the field of teams narrows down to one standing above the rest as the champion.