Jan. 14 2026 | Isaac Garcia | Sports Editor
Next Monday, the college football season officially wraps up when the Miami Hurricanes and Indiana Hoosiers take the field at Hard Rock Stadium and play for a national championship, and despite the many changes the sport has undergone in recent years, many things stay as they’ve always been. Namely, controversies over how a national champion is determined.
For years, national champions were selected by polls after the bowl season, leading to many disputes over who the national champion really was. In 1998, an actual national championship was introduced between the two highest-ranked teams. Today, 12 teams compete in the playoff and regardless of changes along the way, the process still has detractors.
In the current format, the five highest-ranked conference champions automatically make the tournament. This means that at least one of the “Group of Five” teams — soon to be Group of Six now that the PAC-12 has added enough teams to potentially receive an automatic bid again — will make it in. For those unfamiliar, college football has “Power Four” and “Group of Five/Six” conferences, with the Power Four being full of large schools while the remainder of the conferences are full of schools that are a bit smaller. In the first two seasons, the G5 teams involved have lost in lopsided games. Last year, Boise State lost to Penn State 31-14. This year, Tulane lost to Mississippi 41-10 and James Madison lost to Oregon 51-34.
The main gripe some fans have with the inclusion of G5 teams is that they simply aren’t on the same tier as the Power Four teams, and therefore, their automatic spots in the bracket should be removed to fit in more Power Four teams. However, many would counter-argue that point and say that all teams should have a clear-cut way to qualify for the tournament in some form, regardless of school and conference size.
Another issue is that a 12-team playoff has essentially rendered conference championships useless to the point where some teams, although they’ll never admit it, might prefer to miss their conference championship entirely. If a team plays in the conference championship, they’re risking injury in an additional game while other teams that will eventually be in the field get the week off, and the payoff often isn’t worth it. Take the Big Ten Championship earlier this season, which pitted #1 Ohio State and #2 Indiana against each other. Both teams were going to make the playoffs regardless of the result. Indiana beat Ohio State 13-10, and all it meant was that both teams swapped positions. With that being said, the games are unlikely to go away because it’s such a significant revenue generator.
In addition, being top four in a 12-team bracket should be a significant advantage as you get to skip a round, but with the near-month layoff between the regular season and second round, some wonder if that’s negatively affecting the teams with bye weeks. In the past two years, teams that received a bye week to the second round are 1-7. While the effect could be debated, the fact that the highest-ranked teams don’t get a chance to play on their own campus, like teams ranked 5-8 do, puts fans in a strange position. Of course, they’d like their team to have a better chance at a title, but they’d also like to see their local team play as opposed to traveling to one of the bowl locations that host the quarterfinals and semifinals. Now, the easy solution here seems to be just holding off on neutral locations until the semifinals, but because the bowl game organizations hold so much influence, this realistically will not happen.
So here is one proposed solution to hopefully solve these issues while staying realistic. The playoff can expand to 16 teams. Going to 16 will make sure that each team ranked in the top eight gets a chance to play at home. As for how it’s determined who qualifies for the playoffs, each conference could receive a certain number of automatic entries based on merit. For example, it could be based on the average number of teams ranked in the top 16 nationally each year. Conference championships could then be replaced with play-in games for the final qualifying spot out of the conference. Say, for example, the Big Ten has five automatic bids. Rather than having a fairly meaningless game against two teams where both teams make it regardless, the fifth and sixth-place teams in the conference would be battling it out with their season on the line. This would satisfy the conferences and TV networks, allowing them to have a primetime game on that weekend and create a more exciting process for determining the playoff field. Now, there still needs to be a way for G6 teams and independent teams to qualify to ensure fair access to the tournament. Perhaps the best way to go about it would be to leave at least two spots for schools that don’t get a chance to automatically qualify via conference, whether that be an independent or a team from a non-automatic qualifying conference. Not only does this make the playoff accessible, but it would make the aforementioned play-in games much more exciting, knowing that the losers of those games are eliminated.
At the end of the season, the playoff committee’s only job would be to determine who the two highest-ranked non-automatically qualifying conference champions and/or independents would be. After this, the other 14 teams are already determined and all they’d need to do is rank the teams however they see fit from 1-16 and allow the bracket to play out. As mentioned earlier, it could be based on an average over a certain period of time, say five years. If over the previous five-year span, a conference has an average of three teams ranked in the top 16, that would be their automatic bid amount.
Again, this format is purely hypothetical and relies heavily on assumptions that the decision-makers involved would agree. This format also doesn’t solve everything. The playoff would still run into about the third week of January, which runs right alongside the transfer portal. The format also doesn’t solve some of the issues with scheduling that fans and coaches alike have brought up. However, it feels like it might be a step in the right direction towards creating a playoff system with clarity in the qualification process and creating more high-stakes moments while hopefully satisfying as many people as possible.
Contact the author at howlsports@wou.edu
