College Football Playoff: How a 12-team playoff would look in 2022

We have to wait until 2024 for the College Football Playoff to expand to 12 teams. That doesn’t mean we have to wait until then to think about the bracket.

The formation of the College Football Playoff in 2014 expanded the quest to create a more definitive national championship structure that began with the Bowl Coalition in 1992 and stretched through 16 seasons of the Bowl Championship Series. The four-team bracket has mostly satisfied over its first eight seasons of existence, but that doesn’t mean it has been without its share of controversies and snubs.

Once the two-team BCS was expanded into the four-team College Football Playoff, it was only a matter of time before the bracket expanded further. It seemed as though the playoff would expand incrementally, with six-team and eight-team models floated almost as soon as the four-team setup was finalized.

Then the conferences that rule over college football came out of left field and opted to go even further, jumping the shark and stretching the bracket all the way to a full dozen. Now an expanded 12-team College Football Playoff bracket is set to come online in 2014, with the top six conference champions guaranteed access and the top four conference champions earning byes through the first round.

We have to wait two more years to see this all play out on the field, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take some time to speculate about what the bracket would look like if it was already in place.

https://twitter.com/CFBONFOX/status/1599511880610947072

With the selection committee releasing its final Top 25 list for the season on Sunday, it was possible to break down the bracket. With conference championships at a premium, perhaps the most notable feature are the byes for Clemson and Utah that coincide with TCU and Ohio State pushed back into the opening round.

The bracket differs slightly from what a 12-team playoff would look like under the BCS formula. Clemson is more heavily favored by the selection committee than they would have been in the old three-pronged algorithm that aggregated human polls and computer rankings. Conversely, Kansas State would have earned a bye for its Big 12 title victory under the BCS but would play as a No. 9 seed on the road with the selection committee’s rankings as a guide.

Let’s speculate on how these matchups might play out if the College Football Playoff expanded to 12 teams early and we got the excitement of a four-round playoff to conclude this wild campaign.