Well, we’re finally here. And I know many of us thought we’d never make it.
But how great is the new era of college football, with the anticipation of a 12-team expanded playoff, and all that comes with it along the way, bringing an extra dose of awesome to America’s most popular sport?
With January just four weeks away, we’re finally starting to see what the first 12-team CFP field will look like.
And while not every team that wanted in will be there when the bracket is released, what a ride it’s been for dozens of programs big and small — their players, coaches, administrators and fan bases — that had dreams of finally getting a seat at the table.
It sure is a far cry from the days of old, when two or three of the four playoff spots were all but spoken for before the season even began.
The beautiful beginning
One of the things that makes this new playoff system so compelling lies in its simplicity.
I’m sure me and my friends are not the only ones who used to spend time before the season cobbling together 8-team college football brackets, including format, dates, basic guidelines and an easy-to-identify reward structure.
Transforming college football’s postseason took us all of 2 hours at the time.
However, because of a variety of power grabs and off-the-field complexities, it has taken the NCAA decidedly longer. But, hey, we’re here now! Football fans, rejoice!
And this January promises to deliver one of the most exciting, most anticipated, and most-talked about college football postseasons in the rich history of the sport.
After four opening-round games trim down the field from an initial 12 to 8 teams just before Christmas, the quarterfinals, played primarily on New Year’s Day, will bring all-out hysteria to the sport, with college football fever running at a new high.
After that, we’ll get more than a week to break down the semis, which will be played January 9th and 10th and then we’ll get another 10 days to go bonkers about the title game, placing our bets, creating and surviving the hype that leads up to the national championship game on January 20th.
All of this — both today and well into the future — is sure to become a new season of fun on the American sports calendar, complete with uncertainty, peak excitement and all-out Jansanity each January.
Might be 1 vs. 2. Might be 6 vs. 12. Could be any number of intriguing matchups and scenarios between teams that, by that point, will have proven that they’re certainly deserving of their shot at winning it all.
Are you ready for it?
So, that’s where this thing begins. But it’s not even close to where it ends.
If you’re a fan of college sports — football, in particular — you’re gonna know about the playoff year-round. You’re gonna follow it, you’re gonna be swept up by it and you’re gonna love it.
College football has been the king of college athletics ever since I learned how to work a remote control. But there’s always been a sort of predictable nature to one of America’s most beloved and celebrated sports. I mean, Alabama, Clemson and Georgia — or two of the three — in the national title game for eight straight years? C’mon man.
Those were great teams and mostly great games, but their existence as perennial powerhouses and the seeming inevitability of them being in the national championship game each year took a lot of the joy and drama out of the sport.
Starting this year, every team had a chance. From West Virginia to Washington State and BYU to Bowling Green.
The drama began on Day 1 back in August, and it won’t end until someone hoists the trophy in late January.
Under the old system, Cinderellas had little to no place in college football. There were no buzzer-beaters or crazy upsets like in March Madness.
Every once in a while, a new team would crash the party. But just about every time one did, it was bludgeoned in a national-stage snooze-fest. What’s worse, the programs on the wrong end of those beatdowns occasionally were even big names like Oklahoma, Notre Dame or Ohio State.
Prior to the arrival of the order-seeking College Football Playoff in 2015, it was the computer-based BCS that decided who was invited to the party and which program was crowned college football’s champion.
Before that, it was the voters in the national polls who had the final say.
I’m not sure which was better. But I know each was worse than what we’ve got today.
The new format has changed the title chase forever. The game will never be the same.
And you know who’s going to benefit from this?
You!!! Year after year after year.
From local pastime to national obsession
You don’t have to be a sports junkie to understand what college football has meant to the American sports scene for the past century.
It’s there every Saturday, from August to the ringing in of a new year.
Its presence takes over college towns big and small in the fall. And thanks to the never-ending debates surrounding national championship chatter, the Heisman Trophy and a few iconic bowl games, you’ve likely caught wind of at least something college football-related during your day.
Whether that caught your ear in passing — a funny name, a friend’s school, your own alma mater or something local that piqued your interest — or as an obsessed fan who watches from 10 a.m. to midnight every Saturday, college football has always been there.
For decades, college football bowl games were the end-all, be-all of college sports. The pageantry of the Rose Bowl — “the Granddaddy of them all” — and the parade associated with it was appointment-television viewing.
When the Rose Bowl was first played January 1 1902, Michigan clobbered Stanford 49-0, and the lopsided victory led to the game not being played again until 1916.
Regardless of the fits and starts of its road, college football’s postseason played a big role in bringing together a large country with diverse regions, solidifying further the joys of a shared American sports experience.
This was back before corporate sponsors dominated bowl season, when names like the Cotton Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Gator Bowl and others stood on their own and were recognizable from coast to coast.
In years past, highlights of the day’s games were must-see TV. Columns in the local paper on Sundays were devoured and eagerly anticipated.
All of this still exists today, of course. Just in a super-sized, Internet-is-king sort of manner.
The game-day highlights surface on social media and through streaming services mere seconds after the plays happen. Columns, and content in general, are written sometimes three or four times over before the sun rises on Sunday.
In today’s world, the media landscape is layered in podcasts, social media shorts and weekly and daily shows like The Pat McAfee Show, College GameDay and the Barstool Sports guys breaking down every nuance, call and transfer, making all of us arm-chair experts who operate with that inject-this-into-my-veins passion.
Shows like these do a great job of making the excitement that all of us are feeling seem mainstream and relatable. And their ability to do daily deep-dives on all aspects of the new format and the sea of change that the expanded playoff has brought to all of college football’s stakeholders, big and small, is nothing short of phenomenal.
Kudos to them and all the others like them for amplifying an already-exciting era and cultural phenomenon.
It’s that harmonious chaos of living and dying with every second of the action, and the constant search for more, that has changed everything about the way college football is consumed.
This hyper-obsession and thorough analysis has made us all smarter, capable of comprehending the whole field and not just our team and its place in the playoff picture.
That’s what makes the dawn of this new era of an expanded playoff — one that is likely still growing — the right thing at the right time for the sport.
Just the mere mention of being in the mix opens up avenues that never existed. And those of us addicted to following along get to soak up all of the fun along the way. The good. The bad. The right. The wrong. The highs. The lows. The unexpected.
All of it. All year long.
Now Everyone has a chance at a Golden Ticket
The new-look, 12-team playoff format will open doors for college football programs who might not be used to living among the sport’s heavy hitters.
Think back, if you will, to the Heisman Trophy campaigns put together by programs like Hawaii for Colt Brennan in 2007, or Northern Illinois for Jordan Lynch in 2013 or Kansas State for Collin Klein one year earlier.
None of those schools were regulars on the penthouse floor of the college football condo, but each one got to act like it for a brief stint, when their guy got them admission.
Now, fans of every Division I FCS team will start the season with at least a modicum of hope that they will find themselves on the Road to Jansanity at some point in the season.
A real case can be made that the Heisman race itself is being impacted by all of us tracking the race to get into the College Football Playoff simultaneously.
Boise State’s Ashton Jeanty, Colorado’s Travis Hunter and Miami’s Cam Ward are all having outstanding seasons. But if they played for programs that were eliminated from the national title picture in Week 2 or 3, it’s possible that their Heisman campaigns would not seem quite as strong or exciting.
There’s something most sports fans absolutely love about rewarding the guy who leads his team to greatness.
And now, that crown — worn by college football’s national champion — is no longer accessible only to college football’s haves. Even the have-nots get a chance to put themselves in the mix these days.
The dance floor is now open to all — two-steppers, breakdancers, ballerinas and more — so don’t be surprised if it gets a little crowded from time to time, as teams merge on and off of the road to Jansanity.
Just look at the initial tease of this year’s playoff field from the 13-member selection committee, which released the real-time rankings, seeded 1 through 25, in early November.
The top 12 included Boise State, BYU and Indiana, and the list even had a program like SMU listed as the “first team out.”
None of those schools would’ve had even a glimmer of hope of getting into the national championship conversation under the old format. But, now, not only were they in the thick of it, they were actually in position to get a shot to play for it!
Even 3-loss Alabama and iconic Notre Dame, which lost at home to Northern Illinois back in Week 2, are considered by many to be firmly in the field.
And then there’s Group of 5 powerhouse Boise State possibly getting a first-round bye! I tell ya; anything goes on the road to Jansanity, a glorious Gus Johnson-sounding catch phrase if ever there were one.
In years past, 2-loss teams — no matter who they were — had almost no prayer of snagging one of those four CFP spots, and a home loss to Northern Illinois by a perennial power in Week 2 would’ve essentially ended a team’s season.
Not any longer.
No matter how it ends up, it makes for a hell of a ride before you get thrown off.
Teams still have to win to make all of this really pay off. The rest, from weekly chatter to heated debates and actual prayers, is just gravy.
And, hey, isn’t some fun for a whole bunch of programs better than no hope at all for most of them?
There’s a reason they’ve been saying “hope springs eternal” since the mid-1700s.
To those who say tournament play is a bad way to determine a true champion because a lesser team on a good day can upset a more talented team on any day, you must be a lot of fun in March.
Much like college basketball’s Big Dance, the excitement of the college football counterpart starts months before the matchups are set.
So, put your big boy pants on and buckle up because the live-or-die nature of tournament play is here to stay and it is going to be glorious.
There’s still a lot unknown, but this weekend’s conference championship games should clarify things for us, leading up to Sunday’s official unveiling of the first 12-team bracket in college football history.
If you think the buzz and drama of this weekend’s conference title games is going to be intoxicating, just wait for what’s to come.
What this means for Kansas
It remains to be seen how the expanded playoff will impact a program like Kansas football — and others like Lance Leipold’s crew that have been climbing out of a heck of a hole — but, in some ways, it already has.
Think back to August, when the Jayhawks were a popular pick to be in the Big 12 Conference title race.
Leipold had all kinds of talent back, his team was loaded with experience and the Jayhawks were coming off of a 9-4 season in which they upset No. 6 Oklahoma and won their first bowl game in 15 years.
The buzz surrounding the Kansas program was at an all-time high. And it wasn’t just coming from Kansas fans.
In fact, this preseason, the Jayhawks were picked by ESPN to have the best odds of earning a spot in the 12-team playoff of any Big 12 team, at around 24%.
And popular ESPN college football broadcaster Reece Davis actually picked the Jayhawks to make it into the 12-team field.
Didn’t work out, of course — for Davis or KU — but it’s undeniable that even talking about such high hopes would’ve never even been a thing in Lawrence without the growth of the playoff from the old four-team CFP to the 12-team version we have today.
In that way, the 2024 Jayhawks represent all that is great about college football’s new way of doing things.
Visionary leadership in the sport — finally! — has opened the door for schools like Kansas, and countless others, to truly be in the mix, be it for a few weeks in the preseason, from wire to wire in the race to be one of the 12 or as a spoiler along the way.
Talk about a hell of a ride until you get thrown off.
And now, even if that happens, dozens of programs across the country still can find a way to impact the playoff.
Just look at KU this season. Its hopes of reaching the 12-team tournament were long gone after the 1-5 start, but in consecutive weeks in November, the Jayhawks knocked unbeaten BYU and high-profile Colorado out of the national championship picture. And KU's trouncing of 10-win Iowa State before that might wind up costing the Cyclones, too.
The bottom line is this: No matter which teams make it and which teams are left out, from here on out, everyone has a fair shot at finding themselves holding on for dear life on the road to Jansanity.
Game on!
