A 28-team CFP would benefit Kentucky – and college football overall
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- A 28-team College Football Playoff would replace conference title games entirely.
- Expanded format would allow teams like Kentucky greater access to postseason play.
- Proposal increases fan engagement while risking dilution of regular season stakes.
As sports, college football and men’s college basketball have long been polar opposites.
Since the NCAA expanded March Madness to at least 64 teams in 1985, college hoops has had the best postseason championship format of all major American sports.
The tradeoff, however, is that, due to the high number of at-large teams that make the NCAA tourney from the power conferences (33 in 2025), the meaning of the regular season is diluted.
College football has long existed with a conflicting reality. Because it has not had a large tournament to determine its champion, it has historically had the most meaningful regular season in U.S. sports.
Unlike hoops, however, college football has struggled to land on a satisfying postseason structure to determine its champion.
This contrast between the two sports came to mind last week after media reports emerged that the Big Ten has “internally socialized” a proposal to expand the College Football Playoff format from the current 12 teams to 28.
Though much of the fan and media reaction to the idea has been opposed, even scornful, it says here substantially increasing the size of the College Football Playoff has merit.
So far in CFP expansion talks, the Big Ten has been adamant about seeking a set number of automatic qualifiers per league in any enlarged playoff.
The league reportedly proposes to fill a 28-team field as follows: Seven AQs for both the Big Ten and the SEC; five AQs for the ACC and Big 12; two AQs coming from the Group of Six conferences; and two at-large bids.
A 28-team format would have the happy effect of eliminating conference championship games — money grabs that serve no needed competitive purpose. With 28 participants, the CFP would start in early December with its first two rounds held on college campuses.
Back in the day, I used to argue against any playoff system at all in college football. Part of that was to protect the impactful regular season.
It was also because I believed that, in the pre-playoff era of college football, the best team over the course of the entire season was crowned the national champion far more often than it occurred in college hoops. In basketball, the one-and-done tournament to pick a champ, while wildly entertaining, can yield some fairly random outcomes.
Since college football started down the playoff trail, however, the merits of a larger field have grown more persuasive.
There’s so little parity at the top in college football, the same relatively small number of teams — and fan bases — are the only ones who get to experience the thrill of playoff competition.
In the 10-year era (2014 through 2023) of the four-team playoff, there were 40 slots available for participation. Eight teams — Alabama (eight appearances), Clemson (six), Ohio State (five), Oklahoma (four), Georgia (three), Michigan (three), Notre Dame (two) and Washington (two) — combined to fill 33 of those 40 slots.
Last season, when the 12-team CFP made its debut, one of the virtues was that it opened the way for some non pigskin bluebloods — Arizona State, Boise State, Indiana and SMU — to experience the playoff.
A 28-team field would give even more teams and fans a chance to be a part of a college football playoff.
One of those teams could be Kentucky. UK had almost no shot of ever making a four-team playoff. For the Wildcats, qualifying for a 12-team playoff out of the SEC will be extremely challenging and doing so in a 16-team field would only be slightly less so.
However, with a field of 28, the Kentucky teams of 2018 (9-3 regular season, 5-3 SEC) and 2021 (9-3, 5-3 SEC before vacating those wins for NCAA rules violations) would have easily made the playoff.
For The Long-Suffering UK Football Fan to see their team play a meaningful postseason game(s) would be unspeakably cool.
A College Football Playoff of 28 teams would mean that 21.7 percent of the 133 FBS college football programs make the field. That is not substantially different than the 19.2 percent of the 355 NCAA Division I basketball schools that participate in a 68-team March Madness format.
The logistics of a 28-team football playoff should be doable.
For the coming season, the FCS playoff field will number 24 teams. In NCAA Division II, 32 teams will compete for the national championship, while that number is 40 teams in NCAA Division III.
A playoff as large as 28 teams will likely damage the bowl system, though people’s willingness to watch “meaningless bowl games” on TV has proven remarkably resilient. There may be a contraction in the number of bowls with a 28-team playoff, but there likely won’t be extinction.
Just as NCAA Tournament expansion made the college hoops regular season less impactful, a drastic increase in the size of the football playoff field would seem likely to have the same impact on the pigskin season.
Nevertheless, the chance to expand the College Football Playoff experience to more teams and fan bases and to give more communities the chance to host meaningful postseason games is worth that risk.
