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

College Football Playoff semifinals

The usual suspects would litter the top four of a hypothetical College Football Playoff semifinals. In this thought experiment, the only difference from the four-team playoff that will actually be played out at the end of the 2022 season is swapping out Pac-12 champion Utah for Big 12 runner-up TCU.

But just because a 12-team field might winnow down to look a lot like it would if we just went with the selection committee’s top four is no reason to write off the value of playing those extra games from a competitive and entertainment standpoint.

Here is where the serious business ramps up another notch in terms of the stakes and the stress. Who would be most likely to punch their ticket to the championship game?

PEACH BOWL: No. 4 Utah vs. No. 1 Georgia

What an intriguing matchup it would be to see two defensive masterminds in their coordinator days squaring off for advancement and a continued hope of claiming the ultimate prize. Both teams are predicated on limited on minimizing their opponents’ opportunities to light up the scoreboard, and both mostly get that job done.

The problem for Utah is that Georgia gets those things done that little bit better that comes from years of recruiting better raw high school talent and molding it into a machine tailor-made to mint high NFL Draft picks on an annual basis. That talent disparity is finally going to catch up with Utah no matter how hard they try in what would be sure to be a low-scoring battle.

FIESTA BOWL: No. 6 Ohio State vs. No 2 Michigan

Just over a month after these historic rivals met for their annual donnybrook on Thanksgiving weekend, there’s a good chance that fate and the College Football Playoff selection committee would put these two on a collision course for a rematch at some point during the course of playing out the bracket.

Michigan got it done on the road this season, not just beating Ohio State but doing so on the Buckeyes’ own home turf. Would they have enough juice to beat the Buckeyes again? Here’s guessing that Harbaugh and his men in maize and blue would prevail fairly easily as they did throughout most of the regular season to date.

While we might be left with the same two teams in the final that we are likely to see in a four-team College Football Playoff, or even during the two-team BCS era, is no reason to write off the excitement and the fairness of opening up more spots in the bracket. Just advancing to the quarterfinals can make or break a team’s season, even if the ultimate prize remains out of reach.