My Utopian Vision for College Football (aka, 16-team playoff please)

The four-team college football playoff is great and wonderful, but it is also unsustainable.

As a college football fan, the fact we have a true national champion after decades of “mythical” national champions is worth celebrating. Still, there’s a lingering feeling that the system could still be better.

The most pressing concern is the simple fact that five does not fit into four, which means a Power Five conference is left out. Compound that by the inclusion of Notre Dame and the complete impossibility for an undefeated Group of Five team (hi UCF) to make the playoff renders the entire exercise a bit absurd.

How can teams be compared if Notre Dame plays a different schedule than everyone else? What’s the point for Group of Five conference teams, who are essentially eliminated every year before a single game is played?

The recent discussion on expanding the playoff have focused on “fixes” that would make the problem worse. Moving to six teams or eight teams creates more problems than it solves.

So what’s the answer? For years, I have been a proponent of a 16-team playoff. Developments in recent years have only strengthened my belief that’s the future of college football because it would be very, very easy to get there and very…