Every week the CFP Vibe Check tries to put its finger on where things stand in the College Football Playoff race without overreacting to what it just saw, but also probably overreacting to everything it just saw. There may not have been a better weekend of college football to reflect the week's news in the sport. If you had your head in the sand all week, the College Football Playoff is expanding to 24 teams.
The news came and was not well-met by most of the college football literati, or the more vocal sect of college football fans online. But Saturday might have caused some to reconsider. To be clear, I am not a proponent of expanding the field to 24.
In fact, I spent years arguing against expanding to 12, and for many of the same reasons you hear people arguing against expanding to 24. But when I stopped yelling and looked around at the current state of the sport, I realized 12 made sense. Maybe 16 would make even more.
We're never going to see NFL-style parity in college football, but we're seeing far more of it than ever before. It's been brought on by a host of different changes. Conference realignment is the primary factor.
It has concentrated so many of the sport's traditional powers into a few conferences and forced them to play each other all the time when, in eras of yore, those same teams might meet once per decade, if at all. Toss in NIL and a transfer portal, and suddenly the talent becomes a little more evenly distributed at the top. When all that happens, a bunch of strange things occur.
Whether it's Indiana winning a national title, or eight top-20 teams -- and five of the top-10 -- losing in the same weekend. That's what happened this week, and things were almost more chaotic than that. Miami needed double-overtime to beat Florida State.
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