Here's what a 24-team College Football Playoff would have looked like...in 1905

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As of right this second, the College Football Playoff has 12 teams. The leading power brokers of the sport think that isn’t nearly enough, and a long-shot proposal championed by the Big Ten that would expand the field all the way to 24 teams, appears to be gaining momentum. Just last week, leaders in the ACC and Big 12 endorsed the proposal.

Like many fans of the sport, my immediate reaction is that such a dramatic expansion feels like a cynical power play that is more focused on protecting the career interests of coaches and some administrators than it is about producing a valuable product for fans or experience for athletes. That’s way too many teams, and a world where almost any nine-win power conference team can count on making the playoffs is a world where regular season contests are likely to feel much less important.

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But those are not novel arguments. Virtually any sports talk radio host in this country would be happy to walk you through any of the reasons why moving to 24 teams is too much, too soon, and will platform undeserving programs.

Rather than walk through what the bracket might have looked like last season, or perhaps the season before, I thought it might be instructive to go back to a few substantially older seasons in college football history, and see what a whopping 24-team behemoth of a bracket might have looked like.

I feel pretty comfortable stating that the 2007 season was the wildest of my professional career. Back at SB Nation, we basically wrote an entire dang book on all the twists and turns of a campaign that forced America to (briefly) contemplate teams like South Florida, Cincinnati and Kansas in legitimate national title contention. And remember friends, this was before we had any college football playoff. This was the BCS era. Only two teams played for a title.

In real life, LSU (with TWO LOSSES) beat a flawed Ohio State squad for the national title.

To come up with a bracket for our pretend 2007 playoff, I consulted the final regular season AP Poll (before conference title games, since those wouldn’t exist in this format), as well as the Sports Reference SRS ratings..and vibes. Here’s what I came up with:

Just missing the cut, I think, would be some combination of Texas Tech, Penn State, Boise State, Michigan and UConn.

Now, on one hand, 2007 was a rare year in more modern college football, where I think one could make a strong case that any of the top eight seeds legitimately could have won the national title. Maybe later I can do the math to try and game this out (if people wanted it as an offseason post), but at first blush, I think I’d like Georgia, USC or WVU to win it all.

But as fun as the 2007 season was, I wouldn’t say the first weekend of games is THAT enticing. Hawaii was an awesome story that year and truly one of the most fun teams to watch in my lifetime, but given what we saw Georgia do to them, it’s hard for me to see a world where Auburn or Virginia Tech’s defense doesn’t grind them into a pulp. Maybe Florida could have gone on a run? Maybe?

I dunno. This would have been a great year for a 12 or a 16-team playoff. I can’t say I’d be thrilled to watch Virginia or BYU that year try to make a deep run.

The 1990 season

Also an unusually unpredictable campaign, one that gave us co-champions (Georgia Tech and Colorado).

Now, I was three years old during the season, so I can’t say I have deeply held opinions about any of these specific teams. For what it’s worth, Sports Reference has Miami and Washington as the two actual best teams from that season (per SRS Ratings).

The kids out there might forget this, but we didn’t have anything resembling a P5 back in 1990. Six of these playoff teams (Miami, Notre Dame, Florida State, Penn State, Louisville and Southern Miss) were all independents. The Southwest Conference still existed, and the SEC wasn’t the cultural and economic force that it was today. So an expanded field would have created a fun opportunity for the world to see how good, exactly, teams like Houston, Southern Miss and BYU really were. The Extra Points Simulation does not care about things like NCAA Probation.

I wanted to see what a bracket might look like in a season before Oklahoma v Board of Regents, before the conference pecking order was quite so solidifiied, and where talent distribution was less efficient, thanks to segregation.

Also, I wanted an excuse to put the Ohio Bobcats in a playoff bracket, so 1968 it is!

Ohio State won the national title that season, beating USC in the Rose Bowl, marking the last time America would ever need to think about USC’s running back from that year, no doubt about it. A 24-team field would introduce America to not just Ohio, but Wyoming, Richmond, Florida State and Oregon State. With intersectional play more limited in the late 1960s, and with only a few bowl games, I think it’s harder to be as confident in the relative strength (or weakness) in some of the other teams.

It’s kinda fun to look at who might have just missed this field. That would include teams like Rutgers (!), West Texas State, Air Force, Buffalo or Harvard. That’s a good sign that 24 is probably a teensy bit too many.

1946

The closest thing we had to the rampant roster turnover today was probably the year or two right after World War II, when hordes of GIs returned home and were able to transfer and play for (mostly) whoever they wanted. Some successful programs had shut down their teams during the war, or turned into quasi JV squads. This might have been the first year “back” to whatever Big Time College Football was gonna be.

The history books say either Notre Dame or Army was your actual national champion. A deeply expanded field would give schools like Delware (the ‘small school’ national champ that finished the year in the AP Top 20), Rice, Hardin-Simmons (with the nation’s top rusher), Yale and Utah State all fielding strong teams. This might have been a rare year when I could see somebody playing in the first round actually hanging around until the quarter or semifinals. I don’t think there are too many seasons like that.

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Mostly, I wanted to do an expanded field during the really old-timey era of college football, just to see how funny it would be.

I’m not sure if anybody would be able to stop the National Champion Chicago Maroons (although Michigan came close). An eight team playoff would be unique enough, with Swarthmore pretty clearly being one of the eight best teams of that season. But if you expand the field, you’re bringing in Amherst, Brown, Washington & Jefferson, Dartmouth and ugh, Purdue.

My beloved alma mater, Ohio State, wasn’t even in the Big Ten yet. If they wanted to make the field, well, they should have beaten Otterbein.

Okay, I have just one more of these to share.