Ohio State Football: Gene Smith says CFP could go to 16

The Ohio State football team won the first-ever College Football Playoff in 2014 when they beat Oregon for the national championship. The Buckeyes have also made a few other Playoffs as well. In the not-so-distant future, the Buckeyes might have to face more opponents.

That’s because Gene Smith says that he sees the CFP expanding to 16-teams sometime soon. There has been a lot of talk about CFP expansion ever since it was brought to four teams in the very beginning. There was a vote this past year about it expanding to 12, and that failed.

I’m a little surprised that Smith thinks it would jump straight to 16 before going to 12 even for a few years. He seems to think that it would not even get to that stage. Personally, I don’t think that the playoff needs to be expanded at all. I think four teams are just fine.

If it does expand to 16 teams, that would mean that every conference would get an automatic bid, including possibly the non-Power 5 ones. It would also de-value the regular season an incredible amount. Some teams could lose three games and still have a shot to play for a national title.

I don’t know the exact logistics of how it would all work, but I do know that we are getting closer to the NFL every day with these sort of talks. College football is no longer amateur. It is pretty much professional at this point with the players getting paid for NIL, and maybe even revenue sharing.

It will be a few years before the CFP expands at all based on the failed vote last year. We’ll see how the rest of the college football world votes to make the Playoff better for the sport. 16 teams just seems like a lot to me.