Several teams this season were left on the outside looking in at the College Football Playoff—teams many believed had a legitimate case to be included in the 12-team field.
But with the current criteria and format, that’s always going to happen, especially with Group of Five champions earning automatic bids. That’s exactly what we saw this year with Tulane and James Madison securing the final two spots.
That left out teams like Notre Dame, BYU, Vanderbilt, and Texas—four programs that didn’t always make things easy on themselves but would likely be heavy favorites in a head-to-head matchup against either of those two schools.
During a recent appearance on “The Pivot” podcast, Vanderbilt quarterback and newly named Heisman Trophy finalist Diego Pavia made a bold claim: if a Group of Five team like Tulane or James Madison ever wins the College Football Playoff, he’ll give all of the NIL money he’s earned—worth several million dollars—to that school, because he doesn’t believe it will ever happen.
“It’s a 12-team field. You put every team that’s good in there. If a Group of Five team wins it, I would donate whatever I had in NIL back to that school. I would do that—if a G5 team ever wins it,” Pavia said.
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This year’s scenario was unusual because the ACC, one of the Power Four conferences, had an extremely down year. The Duke Blue Devils, who finished with five losses, won the conference championship but didn’t receive one of the automatic CFP bids, opening the door for two Group of Five teams to sneak into the field.
In most seasons, four of the five teams that make the playoff come from the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, and ACC, with just one Group of Five team earning a spot. But after an outcome like this year, there have been calls to revise the rules.
The committee now faces a key question: should the priority be putting the 12 best teams in the field, or rewarding teams for winning their conference championship and being among the five highest-ranked title winners, while filling the remaining seven spots with at-large bids?
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