Narratives surrounding the 24-team College Football Playoff proposal have crystallized into one big, well-meaning fear that it would ruin the greatest regular season in sports, rivalry games, the postseason and maybe every holiday between Thanksgiving and Groundhog Day.But the more I look into the merits of a 24-team CFP, the more I am sold. It won’t ruin college football and the traditions we hold dear. In fact, the 24-team Playoff could save college football and ensure the sport thrives for decades to come.In some ways, college football has never been better. Name, image and likeness money and the transfer portal have spread out the talent. Television ratings continue to rise, and attendance remains high. Indiana, once the losingest program in college football history, just won the national title. But the sport has the potential to implode. Breakaway conversations taking place within the most powerful conferences eventually could lead to an invitation-only super league takeover. Every discussion revolves around money, and it makes sense for every program to investigate how it can generate enough revenue to compete at the highest level.But for most programs, the highest level is elusive. In previous eras, collecting a prestigious bowl invitation was every team’s goal. Now, the sole focus is qualifying for the 12-team Playoff. Anything less is considered unsatisfactory.CFP expansion is going to happen. Three of the four power conference commissioners have endorsed doubling the field size to 24 teams, and the holdout, SEC’s Greg Sankey, is listening. As they weigh what’s best for the sport, they need to look toward 2050, and the benefits a larger, more inclusive Playoff would bring to that future. Here’s why the 24-team CFP is the right system for America’s sport.The regular season effectIn college basketball, a major conference’s 10th-best team can still play for a national championship. In college football, the 10th-best team in the country can’t even qualify for the current 12-team tournament. And if you believe that a 16-team CFP will settle the question of inclusivity for every team of quality, think again.Traditionalists argue the CFP’s goal is to pit elite teams against one another based on regular-season excellence. Under the bowl structure and in a world with smaller conferences, that was a perfect sentiment. But what eighth-seeded Ohio State proved in 2024-25 and 10th-seeded Miami nearly showed last season is that parity now runs deeper in the sport and excellence is ambiguous. Teams with first-round byes are 1-7 in the CFP quarterfinals. NIL and the transfer portal have evened the talent levels. The postseason needs to change with the times. And so do our views on the season itself.With three weeks remaining in the 2025 regular season, 35 Power 4 teams had three or fewer losses. The top nine plus No. 12 in Chris Vannini’s rankings of all 136 Football Bowl Subdivision teams at that point went on to make the CFP. Non-P4 qualifiers Tulane (28th after Week 11) and James Madison (32nd) rounded out the 12-team field.The three-loss teams outside of Vannini’s top 12 had conference opponents and rivalry games left to play, yet the results had no bearing on Playoff positioning. With 25 percent of the season still hanging in the balance, more than 71 percent of the teams with three or fewer losses had no real shot at the Playoff. In a 16-team CFP, Vannini’s top 14 would have qualified.Now, imagine if those teams outside the top 14 still had a shot at the CFP just as the season reaches its zenith. On Thanksgiving weekend in 2025, 10 power-conference games would have directly impacted the 24-team field. Not the bracket, the field. Three-loss teams Texas, USC and Houston would have secured Playoff spots with their wins. Arizona-Arizona State would have decided a CFP berth, not a Holiday Bowl invitation. Losses by Washington, Wake Forest, SMU, Tennessee and Pittsburgh sent them to four-loss territory. Iowa’s 40-16 win against Nebraska led it to the No. 23 ranking, and the Hawkeyes would have gone on to qualify as last season’s only four-loss CFP team.In reality, only three of those 10 games played a role in setting the 2025 12-team CFP field. Miami had to beat Pittsburgh to vault Notre Dame for the final at-large spot. Duke’s win against Wake Forest and SMU’s last-second loss to California sent the ACC into a massive tiebreaker for its championship game, which helped open the door for James Madison. The others became your typical rivalry games that decided bowl positioning and traveling trophies but little else.However, if those games carry direct CFP importance, the interest skyrockets. If Pittsburgh has a chance at the CFP, perhaps its fans fill some of the nearly 20,000 seats that were empty against Miami but taken against Notre Dame two weeks earlier. If a Playoff bid is at stake for Arizona-Arizona State, maybe more than 1.8 million people watch it in primetime. In the season’s penultimate week, an upset like Wisconsin over Illinois and showdowns like Oklahoma-Missouri and TCU-Houston would have garnered more attention than they did as shrugworthy stretch-run contests.“I just love the idea of really meaningful games in November,” UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond said at Big Ten meetings in May. “More teams having a chance. I think that’s something that’s not talked about enough down the stretch. How many more games become that much more important?”Additionally, a 24-team field helps September. A nonconference loss won’t have the devastating effect like it does now. Every school in the Big 12, ACC and SEC scheduled games against 10 power-conference opponents this year. The Big Ten, which had a similar policy until a few years ago, likely will make it unanimous with a 24-team CFP. That would represent a major upgrade from 2024, when just 46 of 68 teams played 10 or more power-conference opponents.Shifting the cutoff pointIn 2010, every school had access to the same level of postseason competition: a bowl game. Today, there’s a clear line of separation in prestige between a CFP appearance and a bowl invitation.Had a 24-team Playoff been in place since 2014, 80 different programs would have qualified at least once. If the format was 16 teams, that number would drop to 61. Illinois, Minnesota, Wake Forest and Vanderbilt would have earned one bid apiece with a 24-team CFP. In a 16-team tournament, only Vanderbilt would have reached the CFP from that group, and it would have been as the final at-large last season.Every tournament requires a cutoff, and complaints are sure to follow. That wouldn’t change if the CFP ballooned to 48 teams. But resumes start to blend together around Nos. 10-12 in the rankings. With two Group of 6 automatic qualifiers, last year’s 12-team tournament became a 10-team field and left out a true contender in Notre Dame. In 2024, the arguments surrounding at-large candidates Indiana, SMU and Alabama were just as fierce. The problem only gets worse when trying to separate teams ranked 10th through 20th.Take the 2019 season as an example. Penn State ended the regular season 10-2 and finished 10th in the CFP rankings. Iowa (9-3) finished 16th, and Minnesota (10-2) was No. 18. In the regular season, Minnesota upset Penn State 31-26, Penn State beat Iowa 17-12 and Iowa beat Minnesota 23-19. Only one of those fairly evenly matched teams would have participated in a 16-team tournament. (No. 17 Memphis, the a 12-1 American champion, would have jumped Iowa for the final spot.)Among the other power-conference teams in the mix for a 16-team CFP ranked after Penn State were Auburn (9-3), Alabama (10-2), Michigan (9-3) and Notre Dame (10-2). All had flaws. No. 19 Boise State (12-1), No. 20 Appalachian State (12-1), No. 21 Cincinnati (10-3) and No. 23 Navy (10-2) also had cases for inclusion alongside Memphis. This isn’t to say any of these teams would have challenged eventual champion LSU; the point is that distinguishing between teams 10 and 20 for inclusion in a 16-team CFP is virtually impossible.Uneven scheduling throws in another variable in separating teams. Ohio State’s 2026 Big Ten opponents compiled a 51-30 record in league play a year ago. Penn State’s went 33-48. The Buckeyes and Nittany Lions don’t play one another this year and could end up with the same record but look vastly different. The same goes for Michigan (46-35) and Wisconsin (28-53).We can criticize realignment, but we can’t reverse those decisions. We can only live with the consequences. A 24-team CFP mitigates some of the side effects.Adapting to changing stakesCollege football changed at a glacial pace until 2010, when rounds of realignment disrupted the sport more than Playoff expansion ever could. There have been 33 affiliation changes among the power conferences over the last 16 years, and once-sacred rivalries have cycled off schedules. Those moves led to major postseason alterations.In 2010, two teams played for the BCS national championship, and eight others earned major bowl bids. When the four-team College Football Playoff debuted in 2014, six bowls rotated as semifinal games, and they dipped significantly in prominence when they weren’t semis. The 12-team CFP further adjusted the postseason when first-round games moved on campus, bringing consistent stakes back to those six bowls but back-burnering the rest of the bowl system.But on-campus CFP games didn’t cheapen the sport; they augmented it. Tennessee fans traveled en masse to Ohio State for the first time. Indiana played at Notre Dame for the first time in 33 years. Those games featured far better atmospheres than what one would find at a neutral site. College football’s greatest assets are its fans and cathedrals.A 24-team Playoff would create 16 on-campus games in the first two weekends in December. Even if two games feature Group of 6 teams, those two weekends would offer 14 on-campus nonconference games between Power 4 opponents, nearly half the number currently scheduled for the entire 2026 regular season (34). The surge would come at a time when teams are shedding high-profile nonconference games, in part because the SEC and ACC have shifted to nine-game league schedules.Show me the moneyOf the 31 public universities within the Big Ten and SEC, 27 reported at least $47 million in operational football expenses during the 2025 fiscal year. A cross-section of the financials of 12 football programs from all four Power 4 conferences indicated that those expenses had jumped by more than $10 million per school on average from the 2023 fiscal year. And that increase was before schools began directly paying athletes.Around 70 percent of the $20.5 million athletic departments are now permitted to share with athletes goes to football. External investment doubles the in-house total at some schools. Fans and donors alike are spending millions to compete for a Playoff spot, not to reach the best bowl possible.For most Power 4 programs, it’s zero-sum nearly every season: CFP or bust. The days of donors shrugging off the difference between playing in the Sugar Bowl and playing in the Citrus Bowl have ended. As we saw last fall with LSU and Penn State firing Brian Kelly and James Franklin, respectively, patience wears thin with national championship-level bankrolls. Both coaches lost their jobs after a third loss. Perhaps both decisions were inevitable, but with their talented rosters, a 24-team CFP could have helped Kelly and Franklin keep their chances of a late-season rebound alive well into November.The rivalry debateWhen Big Ten officials deliberated over the league’s new divisional structure in 2010, then commissioner Jim Delany said a prevailing thought was that Ohio State and Michigan should never meet unless a Big Ten championship was at stake. If a 24-team field is approved, prompting the Big Ten to end its championship game, “The Game” itself could determine the league title for the first time in 20 years.If you believe a 24-team CFP devalues Michigan-Ohio State, how did you feel two years ago when Ohio State won the inaugural 12-team Playoff despite losing to the Wolverines at home? And if anyone thinks either team would rest starters to prepare for the CFP, as ESPN personality Mike Greenberg and others have suggested, Ohio State players cleared that up during their 2024 CFP title run. Losing to Michigan was not palatable under any circumstance.“I like Mike, but you know what, I don’t see that happening,” Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel said in late May. “I can’t envision a world where that would happen.”Ohio State-Michigan is the nation’s most prominent grudge match, but that feeling is not unique. If Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer rests players against Auburn to prepare for the tournament, then I’d suggest one and all tune into “The Paul Finebaum Show” the following Monday.An expanded CFP provides only one negative to rivalry games: It lessens the historic devastation of a loss. As we saw with Ohio State in 2024, it’s probably healthier that way.Imperfection is a givenBathe in all the nostalgia you want, but the sport could never pass a purity test. Bowl matchups often were arranged in October, with game directors selecting teams based on ticket sales and national profile. Early in the Bowl Coalition, a forerunner of the BCS, the Fiesta Bowl chose Notre Dame (6-4-1) to play No. 4 Colorado (10-1). In 2004, Texas leaped past Cal for the final BCS at-large bowl slot without either team playing another game. In 2010, the Fiesta Bowl had to take Big East co-champ UConn (8-4) to match up with Big 12 champion Oklahoma.During the inaugural four-team CFP in 2014, Ohio State jumped TCU and Baylor in the rankings despite those Big 12 co-champions winning decisively on the season’s final weekend. Even in 2025, Notre Dame was ranked ahead of Miami every week until the finale, then the teams were swapped despite neither playing. So spare me the piety to the old postseason.College football’s perfectly imperfect structure needs a renovation. The oversized conferences, unbalanced schedules, off-field economics and changing attitudes about the postseason demand it. All a 16-team field does is force a group of volunteers on the CFP committee to make an impossible choice on roughly 8-10 teams with the same profile. One program gets a marker of distinction; another gets a bowl trip filled with players opting out. Which 9-3 team is better? Nobody really knows.A 24-team CFP is big enough to include every team of quality yet exclusive enough that only 17.5 percent of FBS participants would compete in it, which would remain by far the lowest percentage among major American sports. It adds more impactful games on campus and adds value to November football. It keeps conference structures intact and could prevent wandering eyes from gazing at a super-league setup fueled by private equity.Most importantly, every Power 4 program would have hope on the field, which is priceless in this money-driven era. Let’s embrace that, not mock it.