24? Fuck That: 138!

Because you're a well-informed and curious bunch, you likely saw today's reporting that the College Football Playoff is nearing an agreement to expand the current 12-team tournament to a 24-team version starting in 2027. 

According to ESPN, the revised format will likely have, "...19 at-large bids, the Power 4 conference champions as determined by each league and the highest-ranked Group of 6 team." You should read this as "We're now going to allow 23 Power 4 league members (and their leagues) to have access to the money that's flowing like and oil-field gusher from our broadcast partner and other sponsors." They'll likely say it differently, and make some hand-wavey motions about including non-Power 4 schools in consideration for at-large bids. 

At the moment, New Mexico of the Mountain West has the pole position as the highest-ranked Group of 6 squad in ESPN's College Football Power Index - the Lobos are 38th. For the sake of journalistic accuracy, we'll note without comment that the current second- highest-ranked non-Notre Dame team outside of the Power 4 is 51st-ranked James Madison. Good luck with that at-large bid, Dukes!

We learned long ago that our thoughtful and logical expression of the flaws in college football's postseason structure is more pointless than Hakeem Jeffries' press releases, but since when do quixotic quests scare us? Indeed, friends, as a gallant knight once said, "Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!"

So a'tilting we shall go. 

We see your 24 team playoff and raise you even more madness. I give you The All-Encompassing College Football Extravaganza Sponsored by Gheorghe: The Blog. 138 teams, 14 weeks, wall to wall football with nobody left out. Hope springs eternal for every FBS team each year. 

Here's how it works:

Each of the 138 FBS teams (or however many there are in any given year) play four games in four weeks from the first Saturday of September to start the season - three against conference opponents and one intersectional matchup. After the fourth week, everyone gets a bye (big week for soccer and baseball programming). Said differently for our fans in the Deep South, On the Fifth Week, We Rest.

Starting in Week Six (we start capitalizing now because NOW IT MATTERS) all of the teams are ranked 1 to 138 and sorted into 32 four or five-team groups for round-robin play. If we take the current rankings from CFB TXT, which aggregates all of the major rating models into a single, equally-weighted ranking, and add some AI magic for the sake of geographical compactness, here's what that would look like today:

The top 22 teams in the rankings would be placed in four-team groups - they only have to play three games as a reward for their performance. Teams 23-32 would be the top seeds in five-team groups. You'll note that we named the groups after legendary college football coaches. We left a few out, for reasons.

The round-robin begins in Week Six, sometime in mid-October, and ends after Week Nine, when the five-team groups complete their schedules. Another bye week to rest (Week 10, if you're scoring at home), calculate the 32 teams that advance to the knockout rounds and their seeds (the seeding process will be a three-day shaman-led smudging ceremony, and we'll only know when it's complete when white smoke comes out of Nick Saban's ears), and spin up the McAfee Mouth Machine of Bottomless Hype. 

At some point in the middle of November, the 32-team single-elimination commences, with games played at the home of the higher-seeded team. We get our last four teams (I'd use a different phrase, but that one's taken) at the end of Week 13 in early December. 

Teams that fail to advance from their groups realign and play their own tournaments so we can smash more young fellas' heads together for the entertainment of alumni and a few more dollars for our commercial partners. Someone else can figure out the format - it can't be that hard.

We're still arguing in the conference room about the timing of the last two gameweeks for the Really Big Dance. I'd like to keep the momentum going and finish the season by the end of the calendar year. Others (read: money-grubbing gluttons) want to milk the moment for a month as with the current process and give the semi-finalists a month off before resuming the action. I'm right, but I may not win the day. Either way, we get a champion at some point.

You know you'd watch the fuck out of this tournament. 

Let the real Madness begin.