The College Football Playoff has been the center of controversy since its inception back in 2014. On Friday, it was announced that there are not going to be any changes to the format until at least 2026. According to The Athletic's Nicole Auerbach, the College Football Playoff will remain at four teams through the rest of the existing contract, which expires at the end of the 2025 season.
BREAKING: The College Football Playoff will stay at four teams through the duration of its current contract, source tells @TheAthletic. No expanded field until 2026 at the earliest.
— Nicole Auerbach (@NicoleAuerbach) February 18, 2022
Determining a champion in the sport of college football has been a point of scrutiny for decades. For most of the 20th century, the polls were used. At the end of the season, whichever school sat atop the polls at years end was crowned champion. That opened up criticism to the champion being subjective.
In 1997, the Michigan Wolverines and Nebraska Cornhuskers were crowned co-champions. Michigan was #1 in the AP poll college football pool, and Nebraska was #1 in the coaches poll.
That prompted the beginning of the Bowl Championship Series. The BCS combined the previously existing college football polls with computer rankings to spit out the top two teams at the end of the year. Of course, many people were highly critical of the BCS. A lot of the formulaic numbers used in the computer rankings were hard to digest for fans.
At the time, college football was the only major North American sport without a playoff until 2014. But since then, fans have been complaining that the field of four teams needs to be expanded to eight, or possibly even 16 teams.
From the sound of it, that is not going to happen until at least 2026.
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