On the July 15 edition of Yahoo Sports’ “College Football Enquirer” podcast, co-host Dan Wetzel opined that nine SEC teams had at least some shot of making the newly expanded 12-team College Football Playoff in 2024.
After Wetzel listed, in order, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, LSU, Missouri, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Texas A&M as Southeastern Conference teams that enter the coming season with varying degrees of realistic playoff aspiration, co-host Pat Forde of SI.com interjected to suggest adding a 10th SEC team to that list.
“I will give you one more with at least a puncher’s chance (of making the playoff) if a lot of things go well,” Forde said, “and that’s Kentucky.”
The Louisville-based Forde noted that UK has an ample number of starters returning on both offense and defense; will play its first four games of the season, including the first two conference contests, in Lexington; and added a high-profile, if unproven, quarterback in Georgia transfer Brock Vandagriff from the portal.
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“If (Vandagriff) turns out to be really good, then that could turn out to be the key component there,” Forde said.
That Kentucky — just tabbed to finish 11th in the division-less, 16-team SEC in the league’s preseason media poll — received a mention on a prominent college football media platform in relation to making the CFP illustrates how the expanded playoff is going to change things for the better for fans of teams with football profiles similar to UK’s.
With the CFP moving from four to 12 teams for the next two seasons, then likely expanding again to 14 teams starting in 2026, it is a brave new world for fans of college football programs that are not among the sport’s traditional elite.
There is no certainty, of course, that Kentucky will ever make a 12- or 14-team playoff. But the prospects of UK earning a berth in the expanded playoff are massively greater than the all-but-nonexistent chance the Wildcats had of ever making the four-team bracket.
In the big picture, the problem with the four-team playoff — which began in 2014 and ended last season — was that college football’s lack of parity made that system into a massive function in redundancy.
In the 10 seasons of the four-team playoff, there were 40 slots available to participants.
Of those 40 slots, six teams — Alabama (eight playoff trips), Clemson (six), Ohio State (five), Oklahoma (four), Georgia (three) and Michigan (three) — combined to fill 29 of them.
Add Washington and Notre Dame (two playoff appearances each), and eight teams were responsible for 33 of the 40 total playoff appearances.
Over the entire 10 years of the four-team playoff, only 15 total teams made even one appearance
Not counting league newcomers Oklahoma and Texas (one), even the mighty SEC had only three teams make it — Alabama, Georgia and LSU (one).
If nothing else, a playoff that expands to 12 teams, and probably to 14 in two years, will give more fan bases and more players a chance to experience meaningful postseason contests.
For all those reasons, the CFP eventually growing to 16 teams would be optimal.
(Yes, my enthusiasm for college football playoff expansion inversely matches the intensity of my opposition to NCAA basketball tournament growth.
Those positions are not in conflict.
The 68-team NCAA basketball tournament bracket already includes too many teams that produce mediocre seasons from the power conferences.
Clearing the way for more such teams to make the tournament would further devalue the hoops regular season and cheapen the accomplishment of earning an NCAA Tournament berth — a goal that should require a significant level of achievement to attain.
Conversely, the four-team football bracket has been too exclusionary. While there may not be enough genuine “excellence” to fill the expanded CFP bracket, almost every year there will be more than enough “very good” to justify a larger bracket).
As was displayed with the “College Football Enquirer” podcast’s preseason discussion of the SEC and its 2024 playoff aspirants, an expanded playoff will empower far more programs — and far more fan bases — to start seasons with at least semi-realistic aspirations of competing for playoff berths.
The expanded playoff will mean that many more teams, and their fans, will go deep into seasons with viable national championship aspirations.
All of which should invigorate college football and its constituency groups. If a 12-team playoff had been in effect throughout the 21st century to date, I do not believe Kentucky would have yet made the field.
However, the three best UK teams of the current century — 2007, 2018 and 2021 — would have all gotten to the second half of their schedules alive in playoff contention. Imagine what a blast that would have been for the Big Blue Nation.
The thought that Kentucky might this year have even “a puncher’s chance” to make the expanded, 12-team playoff is justification for UK football fans to, at the very least, let themselves dream a little.
