Ohio State’s title proved that the expanded CFP has devalued the regular season
Matt Tamanini via our friends at Land-Grant Holy Land
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Don’t get me wrong, the Buckeyes winning the national championship is great, but it was only possible because the regular season doesn’t mean as much as it did before.
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There is no doubt that one of the things that makes college football the greatest sport that the gods have ever created is the fact that each and every game carries with it an inordinate amount of excitement and stakes. From the regional rivalries to the relatively small number of games, from the centuries of history to the institutional pride, everything about this sport is built to engender deep emotions from fans, meaning that for many, we live and die with the result of each individual game... and as Buckeye fans, we know that death often feels preferable to a loss.
However, thanks to the first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff, Ryan Day and the
Ohio State Buckeyes might have officially proven that the days in which the college football regular season was sacrosanct have passed us by. We have seen national champions lose games before; of course, our beloved Buckeyes lost to
Virginia Tech before winning out to claim the first-ever four-team playoff title.
But we have never seen a national champion drop two regular-season games, especially one that was as unfathomable as OSU’s embarrassing, demoralizing, regular-season-ending 13-10 defeat to the hands of Michigan. At the time, many onlookers — myself included — considered that to be the worst loss in Ohio State history.
Now, though, my feelings on the defeat have softened. Yes, I still think
that Buckeye team losing to
that Wolverine team in the way that they did is unforgivable, but my anger and resentment have been understandably tempered for the four games that followed.
Day — with the help of a player-led team meeting — was able to rally his squad to go on one of the most dominant and impressive runs in college football history. But that run does raise the potentially painful question of whether or not the expanded playoff has devalued the greatest regular season in all of sports.
While the individual games of college football’s regular season will always be more important than those in baseball, basketball, or hockey, by virtue of the limited inventory that the sport allows for, now that we know that teams can have not one but two regular season losses — including an all-time epic one — and still win the title, it can’t
not undermine the way that we value everything that comes before the playoff, at least from a traditional perspective.
Of course, this new 12 (and potentially 14 or 16-team) playoff does create new benefits for the regular season as well. The expanded playoff opens up paths to the postseason for more teams, which inherently means that more regular-season games have meaning, but that is a different way to look at the sport than we are used to.
In the olden days (literally the 2023-24 season and before), the games that truly mattered down the stretch were exclusively the ones featuring teams at the top of the rankings and conference standings. However, while those games still obviously have meaning, that meaning is now far less than it ever has been before.
Come November, any team in the top six is essentially guaranteed a spot in the CFP, barring an epic collapse; so again, they still have meaning, but since a loss no longer completely ruins their season, the meaning is less than it would have been in the old systems.
Before last year’s playoff, I was someone who argued that while that was obviously true, the ripples cast throughout the sport — making more teams viable contenders for playoff berths — would more than make up for the lost meaning at the top of the sport.
However, looking back on what the Buckeyes were able to accomplish, I have begun to change my mind in some specific ways. I still wholeheartedly believe that more teams having access to the title is undeniably better for the game. I still wholeheartedly believe that the uniquely chaotic regular season of college football is what makes the sport so special.
But I cannot deny that, in the first year of this experiment, the Buckeyes made things more complicated. It wasn’t simply that OSU lost two games, including the regular-season finale to their rivals, before winning the title that changed my mind. It was that between The Game and the first round of the CFP, Ohio State had an opportunity to completely retool everything it did and, in many ways, emerge from a difficult and bitter chrysalis process a completely different team.
While the weeks between the regular and postseasons have always afforded teams time to get healthy, gameplan, and make adjustments, when it comes to a title run, that had never before applied to teams that had so fundamentally failed during the regular season. Obviously, in hindsight (and honestly at the time as well), everyone knew how good the Buckeyes were, but for whatever reason (whether it be coaching, chemistry, or whatever), they hadn’t nearly approached their potential.
Had the playoff not been expanded, the 2024 Buckeyes would have been conscined to the “What Could Have Been” shelf of recent OSU history with the 2015, 2018, and 2019; a group of teams that had more than enough the talent to win it all, but couldn’t quite get out of their own ways en route to doing it. Two of those teams were ultimately thwarted by disappointing regular-season performances. In a four-team playoff, you just can’t afford to have losses like 2015’s defeat to
Michigan State or 2018’s loss to Purdue.
However, in a 12-team setup, not only can you survive those types of missteps, but you are rewarded with an opportunity to use them as motivation. In no other year in college football history would Ohio State have won the national championship following the 2024 regular season. But thanks to the expanded playoffs, they were able to do just that, and I am eternally grateful for that. And while I still believe that having 12 (or potentially up to 16 teams) is good for the sport, there is no denying that Ryan Day’s Ohio State Buckeyes proved that the college football regular season doesn’t carry the same value as it did in the past.
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