College football connoisseur Heather Dinich noticed that excitement and intrigue regarding the College Football Playoffs were amplified exponentially after the sport expanded from a four-team postseason to 12 teams.
New 12-team playoffs a boon to the sport
Fan emotion oscillated from elation to outrage, depending on what team they rooted for and if that program made the final 12-team cut into the playoffs. The new system ratcheted up the discourse on the NCAA multiple degrees — which is a positive from Dinich’s perspective.
“The forefront of everybody’s minds right now is the seating. And there are a lot of questions about, how can you make it better, so that the champions of the Big 10 and the SEC have a more difficult [path] than they had. They had a more difficult road than the runners-up in their respective conferences. How do you fix that? Is there a way that the number one seed doesn’t have such a time off?”
Change is not coming soon
Despite many fans’ discontentment with how the CFP postseason bracket was configured, Dinich said change is not likely to come very fast.
“In order to change something for 2025, people have to remember it has to be unanimous. That is a very difficult thing to get,” Dinich added. “So my sources are indicating change for next season is highly unlikely. But there is a possibility that 2026 is when you could see differences.”
Championship prediction
As far as the championship game, Dinich said she picked Ohio State to win it all before the playoffs started because they were incentivized to go all out after losing to their hated rivals.
“I put my bracket out on Instagram before the playoffs, before the bracket started. And I picked Ohio State because I thought that that loss to Michigan was going to p— them off, and I thought that they were going to finally put it all together.”
Dinich added that she “knew if [the Buckeyes] lost at home to Tennessee, after losing at home to Michigan, we’d be having an entirely different conversation,” that would have most likely involved fans calling for the termination of head coach Ryan Day.
