Why the 24-team CFP proposal should be embraced as next step in college football’s evolution

The word “offseason” has become a misnomer in college football, as the sport truly never stops these days. But just because the sport rages on through the winter, spring and summer months, that doesn’t mean every fan is as locked in. This Week In College Football Offseason is for the college football fan who can’t pay attention to everything that’s going on. Every Friday, we’ll fill you in on everything you may have missed but need to know, and a few things you probably didn’t need to know, too.

The 24-team College Football Playoff is coming. Fight against it all you want. Question its purpose. Decry the professionalization of the sport. It doesn’t matter. It’s Manifest Destiny, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

This week provided more examples of why you’d better accept it. In the idea’s infant stages, it was portrayed as nothing but a hare-brained idea by Big Ten and commissioner Tony Petitti. They were the ones pushing it. Greg Sankey, the principled and upstanding commissioner of the SEC, was the only thing standing between us and the tomfoolery.

Except now, SEC coaches are speaking up about the idea. And guess what? They’re on board. Both Georgia’s Kirby Smart and Tennessee’s Josh Heupel are on record as liking the idea, and why wouldn’t they be?

By my rough math (and by rough, I mean hyperbolic guess), 100 of the head football coaches at the FBS level share three agents. Those three agents have made sure that every single one of those coaches has bonuses in their contracts involved with making the playoff. While the size differs depending on the coach’s gravitas, everybody likes making more money. And the more spots available, the more coaches are likely to make more money.

You will hear people argue that we shouldn’t let coaches dictate the future of the sport because coaches are mostly thinking about themselves. I agree with those people. Instead, we must continue to let television executives dictate the future of the sport, and the conference commissioners who had the foresight to rip apart conferences at the behest of those television executives who eventually dropped the middleman and just took over the conferences themselves!

Am I being sarcastic as all hell right now? You’re damn right I am. Because I am annoyed by everybody when it comes to the College Football Playoff and expansion. I see and hear so many of my colleagues respond to the idea of a 24-team field by saying it’s the last straw, or the final frontier of stupid decisions in college football.

Are you sure about that? 

In the last few years, we’ve seen Cal and Stanford join the ACC. The Big Ten has Oregon, Washington, USC and UCLA. Oh, and it’s still called the Big Ten despite having 18 teams, much like the Big 12 is the Big 12 despite having 16. We are well past the stupid threshold here, folks!

You can also argue that a 24-team format destroys the value of the regular season, but I would argue conference consolidation killed it first. When you have 16 teams in your league, and all the best programs in the sport’s history have been condensed to primarily two leagues, losses are going to come with them.

The idea of every game mattering in the sense of determining the national champion died long ago. The 24-team format is the next logical — and I use that term loosely — step in the process of taking college football from its 20th-century values to a 21st-century reality.

Don’t worry, it’ll all be fixed soon

Thankfully, President Donald Trump doesn’t have much on his plate at the moment, which has left him ample time to save college football. Relax, dear reader! All the ills of the sport will soon be a distant memory because President Trump is compiling a crack team of experts to hang out with him in Florida and solve them.

The group includes former coaches like Nick Saban and Urban Meyer, as well as former players like Charlie Ward and Tim Tebow. All four Power Four conference commissioners will be there, as well as the American’s Tim Pernetti (anti-trust laws, afterall), as well as a mix of current and former athletic directors. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will be there, as will former Secretary of State and one-time head coaching candidate of the Cleveland Browns Condoleezza Rice. And what would a meeting of our brightest minds be without television executives, billionaires and Bryson DeChambeau for some reason?

The only people who won’t be in attendance are current players or agents representing them because, honestly, they’ll just get in the way. 

No new taxes!

The state of Mississippi caused quite a stir this week when the Mississippi House of Representatives advanced a bill that would keep college athletes from paying income taxes on NIL earnings in the state. It’s a move meant to combat the advantages that three other SEC states without state income taxes (Florida, Tennessee and Texas) already have.

Arkansas also passed a similar exemption last year. So, clearly, the race is on in SEC country find ways for people who make a lot of money not have to pay taxes. What I don’t know is how much athletes at Ole Miss and Mississippi State (and other state schools) who don’t hail from the state of Mississippi will have to pay in taxes in their home states, but hey, that’s not my problem, nor is it the problem of anybody who helped pass the bill. In fact, there’s no need to mention this to any possible recruits. All they need to know is they won’t pay any of those taxes in Mississippi!

Sure, some of you may find this offensive, and you may worry about how this country keeps finding new ways to let the corporations and people making the most money pay even less in taxes, but you’re looking at this from the wrong angle.

When you’re stuck at home because you can’t afford to go anywhere after paying yours and everybody else’s taxes, you’re going to want a good football team to watch on one of the 15 different networks and streaming services you’re now required to pay for with what little you have left. It’s more than a fair trade-off.

The NCAA ain’t heard no bell

You fools! You thought the eligibility sagas of Joey Aguilar and Trinidad Chambliss were over? In the words of the great Lee Corso: Not so fast, my friends.

While Joey Aguilar has moved on and is preparing for his NFL career after having his court case go against him, Trinidad Chambless is still at Ole Miss getting ready for the 2026 season after winning his case against the NCAA. But the NCAA isn’t ready to concede just yet. Perhaps the win over Aguilar has got the NCAA feeling chesty and ready to take a heat check.

So will Trinidad Chambliss be Ole Miss’ 2026 starting QB, or will the NCAA win this appeal? Who knows? There are no rules, only vibes, and ridiculous quotes from lawyers.

South Carolina is in trouble

In actual football news (we’re only 1,200 words in), the one thing fans hope for from their team in the spring is that they avoid any serious injuries. A pulled hamstring? Sure, that’s fine. Sprained ankle? No big deal. Let’s avoid those season-ending injuries that require surgery.

South Carolina did not get the memo. Shane Beamer announced this week that Josiah Thompson, who has started the last two seasons at left tackle, taking 1,462 snaps, will miss the 2026 season due to an injury that he apparently played through last year. This comes on the heels of losing Jacarrius Peak to a knee injury in February. Peak, who transferred to South Carolina from NC State, injured his knee during a 3-on-3 basketball tournament organized by the program.

The hope is that he’ll be back by the start of the season, but it’s the first week of March, and the Gamecocks are currently without both tackles. It’s not a great place to be.

The ads are here

Every professional sports league has been selling ad space on uniforms (and walls, and turf, and video boards, and anything else you can print, stitch, or tattoo one on) for a while now, and college football is a professional sport now, so it’s no different.

Arkansas announced a deal this week with Tyson Foods. CBS Sports senior writer Brandon Marcello has the details:

The Razorbacks and Tyson Foods have entered into a sweeping five-year partnership that will place the company’s logo on the jerseys of all 19 Arkansas teams beginning in the 2026-27 academic year. But the branding is only part of the story – roughly 90% of the money generated by the deal is expected to flow directly to Arkansas athletes through name, image and likeness opportunities with the company.

Arkansas athletics director Hunter Yurachek calls the agreement announced Wednesday “the largest true sponsorship agreement in college athletics right now.”

These are simply the kinds of things that must be done to pay our new transfer QB that tax-free salary, folks.

Trent Dilfer has regrets

Trent Dilfer’s stint as the head coach at UAB did not go well. He was fired halfway through the 2025 season after going 9-21 over 2.5 seasons, with a 5-14 mark in the American. As you’d expect of a coach who won only 30% of his games, Dilfer has some regrets.

The biggest of which is going back for leftovers. Via the Hot Mic podcast:

“If I had to do it all over again, I would have just stuck with high school, had one or two year players, and lost them but would have been a .500 football team. Because when you go to the portal for leftovers, that is what you get. They are good kids, they’re looking for opportunities, but there’s a reason why it didn’t work out at their last school if they’re coming to UAB. There is usually a competitive piece to it, it’s not a traits thing.”

“We had some trait-y kids. In fact, we’d go play Tulane and Jon [Sumrall] would say ‘Hey, you got a good looking team,” and I’d say, “Yeah, well wait until this thing gets hard, and see how they respond.’ That is where the personal fouls, and the lack of discipline, and missed assignments and dropped balls, and bad reads would pop up because from a competitive temperament standpoint there’s a reason it didn’t work out at Maryland, or Georgia Tech, or wherever we are getting them from because when it gets hard, a really good player rises. Our players…shrunk, and that was the thin in three years was just watching, unfortunately because I love these kids and got really good relationships with them, but just watching them shrink and remembering when I was a player, what that felt like and fighting through that and becoming a riser as a player instead of a shrinker as a player.”

“But when you’ve got a team of shrinkers, you’ve got no chance.”

Nothing says “I love these kids” like throwing them under the bus and telling the entire world you regret taking them and that they couldn’t handle the moment. The irony here, of course, is that UAB went the high school route by hiring Dilfer (who has returned to Lipscomb Academy) in the first place. Maybe it should’ve gone after a failed Power Four coach instead?

RIP Lou Holtz

College football lost one of its great personalities this week. Lou Holtz, who won 249 games as a head coach in stints at William & Mary, NC State, Arkansas, South Carolina and, of course, Notre Dame, passed away at the age of 89. Holtz’s most prominent accomplishment as a coach was winning a national title at Notre Dame in 1988. No other coach has won a national title with the Irish since.

Personally, by the time I began to get acquainted with college football, Holtz was at the end of his run with the Fighting Irish. He would spend an additional six years at South Carolina, but my memories of Holtz mostly stem from who he was off the field.

My most prescient memories of Holtz are as a television personality. Way back, in the long, long ago, before every single college football game was televised, you had to tune into highlight shows on Saturday night to see what you missed around the country, and that’s where Holtz became a central figure in my college football fandom.

I absolutely loved watching Holtz go at it with Mark May in Final Verdict on ESPN, with Rece Davis serving as the judge. My colleague and Cover 3 podcast co-host Chip Patterson wrote an excellent column about how Holtz was one of the first stars born of the sports television boom, and I strongly suggest you read it. I agree with damn near every syllable.

College football was better because of Lou Holtz, on the field and in living rooms across the country. He will be sorely missed.