The College Football Playoff has one glaring problem

Look around social media and you’ll see them starting to crop up — 2025 preseason college football rankings. Some combination of Texas, Georgia, Ohio State and Oregon rules the top 10, which is fine and reasonable except for the fact that the 2024 season isn’t even over yet.

Ohio State and Notre Dame — remember? They’re the ones still alive in the College Football Playoff — don’t even kick off for another few days, and here we are looking ahead to 2025. You don’t see this in the NFL; nobody’s predicting how the 2025 Chiefs are going to fare, or whether the Eagles will make the Super Bowl in 2026. But here we are over in college football land, creating stories because there are, at the moment, none to tell.

We get it — the College Football Content Industrial Complex abhors a vacuum, and there is most definitely one hell of a vacuum in college football right now. The new 12-team CFP started a month ago — which feels like forever, since it was on the other side of the holidays — and both of these teams have played exactly once since New Year’s Day.

For fans of a certain (advancing) age, college football always had a natural endpoint: New Year’s Day. It’s why the Rose Bowl became legendary; you spent New Year’s Day shivering somewhere back east while two brilliant-uniformed college squads did battle in the California sunshine. In later decades, you got the Orange Bowl first, the Rose Bowl in the afternoon and the Sugar Bowl at night, and all was right with the world.

But once the Bowl Championship Series began, the date of the bowl hosting the BCS championship game started to push into January — the 3rd or the 4th, depending on how the calendar fell. When the BCS broke off a separate national championship game, its date extended even deeper into January, to the 7th or 8th. And through the…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/the-college-football-playoff-has-one-glaring-problem-185148841.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2025-01-16 18:51:00

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