CFP Format Changes for 2025 Are 'Unlikely' Despite the Clearly Broken System We're Seeing

After watching the first two rounds of the College Football Playoff and seeing what anyone with common sense had forecasted for months come to pass in the first iteration of the 12-team CFP — the seeding being completely incorrect, wrong teams having byes, top seeds being punished with infinitely more difficult paths than teams they beat — I figured it was little more than a foregone conclusion this would be fixed before next year. Ok, you tried these awful ideas and it turns out they did, in fact, make the field unfair, so let's make some changes before 2025 and get this right.

Unfortunately, it seems like that's not going to happen.

I deeply resent the fact that this terrible system is going to be held up by the Group of Five leagues so we can have Boise State get a bye in the Playoff while the No. 1 team in the country is an underdog in its first game and the 6-seed gets a cakewalk to the semi-finals. This is lunacy. And it's probably going to accelerate talks amongst the SEC and Big Ten of breaking off from this whole thing and forming their own super league, which is not what anyone wants. But if they're being held hostage by the Mountain West and MAC, at some point they're going to say enough is enough.

The flaws are clear and obvious. All four teams with a bye lost — two of which were due to the fact they were the two worst teams in the field and one because it was given potentially the best team in the country as its opponent despite earning the No. 1 seed. Oregon would be in the semi-finals as a favorite over Notre Dame right now if it had lost the Big Ten Championship Game on purpose instead of beating Penn State to win the conference. I honestly hope we have teams in similar situations try to forfeit or make a mockery of the conference title game if it's clear that losing is in their best interest. If the CFP committee wants to leave things as they are, then teams should play by those rules and do whatever it takes to give themselves the best chance to win a national championship.

I sincerely hope common sense prevails in trying to get this stuff fixed. One year of it was too much, we can't afford any more. This sport is too great to have the thing we've made the entire thing revolve around be this fucked up.