What we learned from the first year of the 12-team College Football Playoff

College football crowned its newest national champion on Monday night, as Ohio State beat Notre Dame to become the first team to win a title in the 12-team College Football Playoff era.

As we sit here at the end of the longest season in the sport’s history, it feels like a good time to reflect on all that we’ve experienced since Labor Day weekend. We’ve learned a lot!

Here are the 12 biggest lessons I learned from the first year of the 12-team College Football Playoff:

On-campus Playoff games are awesome.

Now, this wasn’t a shocker. We knew the first-round games would be special, because the magic of college football is what we see and hear on Saturdays in college towns. All the pomp and circumstance is what separates college football from its professional counterparts. And even though the four first-round CFP games were varying levels of lopsided, the environments were electric. I’d love to see the CFP put the quarterfinal round on campus, too. It just doesn’t seem fair that the top four seeds don’t get to host — while their fans would have to pay to travel to three neutral-site games if they want to follow their team all the way to the national championship. That’s too much to ask of fans. Put at least two rounds of games on campus, please!

It’s nice not to write teams off after one bad September loss.

My biggest issue with the four-team CFP era was the way too many fans and media members only talked about the sport through the prism of the Playoff. And in that era, there were usually only 6-8 teams at the start of the season that had a legitimate chance to make the four-team field. We — meaning the collective college football community — essentially eliminated teams from CFP contention after early-season losses and then largely ignored them the rest of the year. I hated that, and I know so many fans who…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/learned-first-12-team-college-130000050.html

Author : NBC Sports

Publish date : 2025-01-23 13:00:00

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