Ohio State’s title proved that the expanded CFP has devalued the regular season

There is no doubt that one of the things that makes college football the greatest sport that the gods have ever created is the fact that each and every game carries with it an inordinate amount of excitement and stakes. From the regional rivalries to the relatively small number of games, from the centuries of history to the institutional pride, everything about this sport is built to engender deep emotions from fans, meaning that for many, we live and die with the result of each individual game… and as Buckeye fans, we know that death often feels preferable to a loss.

 

However, thanks to the first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff, Ryan Day and the Ohio State Buckeyes might have officially proven that the days in which the college football regular season was sacrosanct have passed us by. We have seen national champions lose games before; of course, our beloved Buckeyes lost to Virginia Tech before winning out to claim the first-ever four-team playoff title.

 

But we have never seen a national champion drop two regular-season games, especially one that was as unfathomable as OSU’s embarrassing, demoralizing, regular-season-ending 13-10 defeat to the hands of Michigan. At the time, many onlookers — myself included — considered that to be the worst loss in Ohio State history.

Now, though, my feelings on the defeat have softened. Yes, I still think that Buckeye team losing to that Wolverine team in the way that they did is unforgivable, but my anger and resentment have been understandably tempered for the four games that followed.

 

Day — with the help of a player-led team meeting — was able to rally his squad to go on one of the most dominant and impressive runs in college football history. But that run does raise the potentially painful question of whether or not the expanded playoff has devalued the greatest regular season in all of sports.

 

While the individual games of college football’s regular season will always be more important than those in baseball, basketball, or hockey, by virtue of the limited inventory that the sport allows for, now that we know that teams can have not one but two regular season losses — including an all-time epic one — and still win the title, it can’t not undermine the way that we value everything that comes before the playoff, at least from a traditional perspective.

 

Of course, this new 12 (and potentially 14 or 16-team) playoff does create new benefits for the regular season as well. The expanded playoff opens up paths to the postseason for more teams, which inherently means that more regular-season games have meaning, but that is a different way to look at the sport than we are used to.

 

In the olden days (literally the 2023-24 season and before), the games that truly mattered down the stretch were exclusively the ones featuring teams at the top of the rankings and conference standings. However, while those games still obviously have meaning, that meaning is now far less than it ever has been before