College Football Playoff On Verge Of Going To Straight Seeding For 2025 Season

The days of conference champions being awarded an automatic bye in the first round of the College Football Playoff may soon be a thing of the past.

Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger reports that the CFP executives are scheduled to take part in a call today where many of them expect to move to a straight seeding model, as opposed to last year’s model that awarded first-round byes to the four highest-rated conference champions.

The five highest-rated conference champions would still automatically qualify for the playoff, but the actual seeding would be based on the CFP committee’s rankings.

This move would only be set for the 2025 season given that the 2026 season is expected to feature an expanded 16-team playoff.

Here’s what the seeding would have looked like last year under the new proposed straight-seeding scenario.

Oregon
Georgia
Texas
Penn State
Notre Dame
Ohio State
Tennessee
Indiana
Boise State
SMU
Arizona State
Clemson

A straight seeding would have greatly changed the layout of the playoff last year, giving some actual benefits to the teams with first-round byes.

Ask Oregon if they would have rather had the winner of Indiana and Boise State as opposed to Ohio State in the second round. Ask Tennessee if they would have preferred a home game against SMU in the first round and then a game against Georgia in the Sugar Bowl instead of having to play in Ohio Stadium at night in 20-degree weather.

Speaking of the Buckeyes, would a home game against Arizona State have been enough of a draw to keep it at night like last year’s Tennessee game? That feels like a place for Clemson at Notre Dame. The Buckeyes and the OSU crowd were up for a night game in a stadium that had 25,000 Volunteer fans. Would the stadium have been as raucous for a 4:00 pm kick with 623 Sun Devil fans in attendance? Would the Buckeyes have been able to set the kind of tone that reverberated for weeks?

At least Ohio State wouldn’t have had to play Texas in the Cotton Bowl.

Penn State would have received a first-round bye, but they wouldn’t have gotten to face two of the three or four worst teams in the playoff.

Seeding the teams based on rankings will take away what was seen as a pretty nice road for the teams that get seeded fifth and sixth. It will also reward the teams that are deemed to be the most deserving. For instance, the top-ranked Ducks would have actually been favored in their first playoff game for a change.

Giving automatic byes to the top four conference champions was a nice thought, but it just looked ugly. It was the bad luck of the draw for the CFP last year, which made the desire to change it even greater. Had everything fallen in a line that made more sense, then there wouldn’t have been nearly as much angst.

But having Arizona State and Boise State waiting to get the winner of games between two (potentially) better teams just felt too wrong to not discuss changes.

Nothing has been finalized yet, so this sensible plan can still fall through, but the CFP has apparently promised to still pay the conference champs the same whether they have a bye or not.

Not that this is only about money, of course.

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