CFP expansion to 12 teams a big win for college football

FOX Sports college football analyst Joel Klatt has been a strong advocate for expanding the College Football Playoff field, so when news broke last week that the CFP Board of Managers had approved a 12-team model, he was beyond elated to hear the news.

“Hallelujah,” Klatt shouted when addressing CFP expansion on the debut episode of his new podcast, “The Joel Klatt Show.” “This move is going to help the sport get to a place where it can be the best it can possibly be.”

In a unanimous vote that was necessary to pursue early expansion, 11 university leaders who make up the board approved the 12-team proposal. The new model calls for the six highest-ranked conference champions and six at-large picks — as determined by a selection committee — to make the playoff. The top-four seeded conference champions will receive byes.

Klatt went on to explain why expansion is vitally important to the sport of college football, and it all comes back to one word … parity.

“I want this sport to be as robust and as good as it possibly can be, and in the current model of the four-team playoff, that’s impossible because the four-team model has been really detrimental to the sport” Klatt explained. “The biggest issue has been the consolidation of all the talent, all the wins, all the definition of success into a hyper-small group of programs. 

“We can’t have that. We’ve got to get to a place where there’s more parity in college football.”

Joel Klatt’s breakdown of the 12-Team College Football Playoff

Joel Klatt discusses the newly announced 12-team College Football Playoff format, which could be implemented as soon as 2024.

Since the College Football Playoff was officially implemented back in 2014, only 13 programs have made it, which is 10% of the FBS landscape. Of those 13 teams, only five programs have gone on to win the tournament – Alabama (3 titles), Clemson (2), Ohio State (1), Georgia (1) and LSU.

If a 12-team format had been in place since its implementation, a total of 41 programs would have made an appearance, which is more than 31% of FBS programs. That would have included several non-Power 5 schools such as Coastal Carolina, Western Michigan, Memphis, UCF, as well as some surprising Power-5 programs like Colorado and Indiana.

“This would have changed college football dramatically,” Klatt said. “All of these teams would have had the opportunity to go and recruit with this in their back pocket. You can’t understate that.”

[How A 12-Team College Football Playoff Could Have Looked]

Klatt points out that the five schools that have landed the highest total of 5-star prospects since 2014 happen to be the same five schools that have won a national title during the CFP era.

“I think it’s bad for the sport when you shove all the recruits in just a small area. We need to have this be dispersed,” Klatt said. “If those 41 teams can go out and recruit and say ‘we’ve made the playoff,’ then those brands can get some of those 5-star athletes and I think we can achieve some parity.”

While Klatt is confident in the new model helping college football reach that point, he does caution fans that this will take time.

“This is not going to happen overnight,” Klatt said. “But it will get there if more teams are able to define themselves as ‘top-end successful’ … and a playoff berth will do that.”