The whole point of the 12-team College Football Playoff was to expand the field, but the results ended the same way we've grown accustomed to seeing.
When the College Football Playoff made the decision to expand, it was with the idea that we would see new matchups and a diverse group of winners at the top. However, if we learned anything from the results on Monday night — which saw Ohio State win its second national championship in the last 10 years — it's that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
During the era of the 4-team playoff, what we constantly heard was fans complaining about seeing the same teams represented in the semifinals. People were tired of seeing Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, and Ohio State. The hope with an expanded field was that we would get more diversity, but here we are, and what did we get? Much of the same.
The College Football Playoff era as a whole has lasted a total of 11 seasons, with its inaugural year kicking off in 2014. In those 11 seasons, we have a total of six teams who have won national championships, four of which have won multiple titles.
- Ohio State (2014, 2024)
- Alabama (2015, 2017, 2020)
- Clemson (2016, 2018)
- Georgia (2021, 2022)
That means that there has only been two seasons in the CFP era that ended with a team other than the four we have listed above winnning the national championship. In those two seasons, only one national championship game didn't feature any of the four teams above — in 2023 when Michigan beat Washington — because the other national champion was LSU in 2019, who beat Clemson.
While the 12-team playoff certainly had its moments of excitement and we might be on the verge of a new era that will yield different results, we can't say that happened this year. Instead, it was another "regular" who ended up winning the whole thing.