The expanded 12-team College Football Playoff has injected energy into the sport like never before. More teams mean more drama, higher stakes, and late-season games that genuinely matter well into December and January.
Home sites in the first round bring campus pagentry and raucous environments to the postseason, while the prestige of bowl games awaits the national championship game in Miami. For fans, the excitement is undeniable—it’s March Madness for college football, perhaps even better.
But beneath the buzz lies a persistent problem: the CFP selection process remains flawed and subjective. Alabama sneaks in with three losses, including two questionable ones; Notre Dame is left out entirely; and two Group of Five teams punched their ticket. While the committee has made some improvements—like straight seeding this year—inconsistencies, bias, and structural compromises continue to fuel controversy.
Head-to-Head Discrepancy and Big Brand Biases
Alabama’s inclusion, despite three losses—including a poor showing against Georgia in the SEC Championship Game and a season-opening defeat to now 5-7 Florida State—underscores the influence of brand and conference power. Losses, schedule strength, and head-to-head results are supposed to guide selections. Yet, the committee often prioritizes prestige over performance.
Notre Dame, with a cleaner resume, is left out, punished for independence and missing a conference championship. Wins against top opponents matter until they don’t; schedule strength matters until it doesn’t. The system struggles to convincingly select the 12 best teams, instead leaning toward the most marketable or historically favored programs.
The Irish were ranked ahead of Miami for much of the season, but the Hurricanes had already beaten them in Week 1. Notre Dame was led to believe they were in, then yanked out at the last minute. This process was unfair to both teams, who were pitted against each other, when Alabama was the team that really did not deserve to be in.
The hypothetical “wedge” separating Miami and Notre Dame—allowing the Irish to be ranked higher unless they were adjacent—illustrates how convoluted this process has become. Either Miami should have always been ahead of Notre Dame, or always behind.
Ideally, both would have made it while Alabama missed out—but the committee could not exclude its prized Crimson Tide two years in a row; it was almost a surprise that they were rightly left out with two bad losses last season to 6-6 Vanderbilt and Oklahoma.
Two G5 Teams Making the Field: Access or Competitiveness?
College sports thrive on the underdog narrative, but in football, the talent differences are extreme. Even the best FCS teams often struggle or outright lose against the worst teams in all of FBS in what is commonly known as a “buy game.” Those might be one of the only wins of the year for lesser FBS teams, but that just goes to show the differences in the levels of college football.
The Group of Five is similar: a large gap exists between G5 contenders and especially the elite Power Five programs loaded with NFL talent, which most power teams cannot even come close to beating themselves. Even average/below-average P4 teams often schedule and defeat good G5 programs with relative ease to prepare for conference play.
A solid G5 team like Ohio, which won 11 games and the MAC Championship in 2024, struggled to defeat 4-8 West Virginia at home and failed to upset now 5-7 Rutgers in the season-opener. They then proceeded to lose 37-9 to Ohio State in Columbus. The first two teams are nowhere near College Football Playoff contenders but yet were a near-equal or superior team to one of the perceived best G5 teams in the country, just to show a comparative example.
This year, Duke’s 8-5 ACC title allowed James Madison to join Tulane, despite JMU’s one loss being 28-14 to an eventual 8-4 Louisville squad. While it’s no fault of JMU or Tulane, they now face extremely difficult battles: James Madison will face high-flying Oregon, which humiliated the likes of Oklahoma State and Rutgers, and Tulane was run off the field 45-10 by Ole Miss, where they will return for the opening matchup of their postseason.
Boise State, meanwhile, proved far more competitive against power conference teams last year, losing 37-34 to Oregon in Week 2, but still could not advance past Penn State, which, in turn, continued to have big game demons the second they took on Notre Dame.
This year, Ole Miss is a 17.5-point favorite over Tulane, while Oregon is a whopping 21.5-point favorite over the Dukes. Vegas tends to be very conservative with these lines, so they are fairly certain that these games will likely not even be that close.
G5 representation is important, but it should be limited to one team per season—and only if they meet a universal standard, such as being ranked in the top 20. This ensures that most games remain competitive rather than predictable blowouts, as two out of the four opening-round games will likely become, especially at the home site of the better team.
If we really want to allow the Group of Five to get their fair shake, let them have their own national championship tournament, allowing them to truly compete for a title rather than get a charity bid for the sake of inclusion and get run off the field in the first round.
This year, teams including Notre Dame, BYU, Texas, and Vanderbilt were left out while JMU, Tulane, and three-loss Alabama got in. The 12-team CFP is a vast improvement over the four-team invitational of the past, but the road remains long before we can claim the system truly pits the 12 best teams against each other for a national title.
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