A Selfish Take: Michigan Football Should Welcome an Expanded Playoff.

Why it makes sense for Michigan football to pursue expanding the College Football Playoff.

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November 30, 2024.

It’s Week 12 of the college football season and the floundering Michigan Wolverines are walking out onto the field in Columbus to take on second ranked Ohio State, archrival and 21-point favorite. Davis Warren and the boys in maize and blue should have stood no chance, but a chaotic game script and Buckeye implosion delivered one of the funniest, surprising, and most satisfying wins in Michigan football history. 

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For the Wolverines, the nonsensical win salvaged the season. For the Buckeyes, it should have ruined theirs. But it didn’t. Not fully. 

Yes, in the subsequent days and weeks, the program went through a crisis, with the fans revolting and Ryan Day appearing as a dead man walking. However, since the College Football Playoff (CFP) had just expanded from four to 12 teams, the Buckeyes had life yet. 

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They backdoored their way into the bracket as an eight seed, despite inexplicably dropping the season finale against Michigan for a second loss. Then, they tore through the tournament and walked away with a national championship for their efforts. 

In almost any prior season of college football, a two-loss team would not have won the national championship - only two had done so before. The Buckeyes would have been toast after losing to Michigan, dead in the water and facing existential questions as a regime. Instead, they won a natty.

In fact, 2024 was the second time a Buckeyes squad was the immediate beneficiaries from an enlarged playoff format. Ohio State won the national championship in 2016 as well, another year featuring a newly expanded CFP bracket, also as a team that would have missed the postseason in any other season of college football history.

Ohio State has won five national championships in the modern era of college football. Their two most recent are thanks to expanding CFP formats –this is the lesson Michigan must learn for current deliberations about the future size of the CFP. 

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Michigan could benefit from a 24-team playoff

There is momentum for an expanded playoff right now. Athletic directors, conference commissioners, and TV executives see an expanded playoff format as an obvious opportunity to increase revenue streams and solidify the hegemony of the major conferences of our sport. 

Shifting to such a 24-team playoff format comes with plenty of downsides. Smaller teams would suffer - especially the non-majors who would essentially be playing in a different division of the sport - regular season games would be further diminished in importance, and the sport would fall further into the grasp of decision makers committed to the bottom line over the well-being of the sport. 

But, if one is a wholly selfish Michigan fan, one singularly concerned with how Michigan and Michigan alone would emerge from such a shift,  then one should support the Wolverines throwing their weight behind an expansion. 

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The sport is consolidating. Teams beneath the cut line simply can simply no longer compete with those above it, and Michigan must embrace being one of the select few brands fortunate enough to occupy a position of power which guarantees their relevance and enables them to shape how the sport evolves. Why not leverage that standing to secure a stronger long-term position for the program?

Expanded playoff would almost guarentee Michigan a seat at the table ever year

An expanded playoff essentially guarantees Michigan a berth every year. If the name of the game is championships, that is a deal Michigan cannot refuse. If the Wolverines had made a 24-team playoff last season, in what year would they not?

Of course the Michigan team of last year would not have won the title, they were not good enough to. But future Wolverine squads possessing that quality who slip up in the regular season will forever have the opportunity to hoist a trophy and win a ring with the expanded playoff. 

Learn from the Buckeyes. Don’t shy away from your status. Give yourself the wriggle room to be imperfect and guarantee the opportunity to win a title each and every year. Pursue expanding the playoffs.