If the 2020 Covid non-sense has taught us anything. It's something we already knew… The College Football Playoff setup is stupid and needs fixed.

The CFP committee missed a golden opportunity to temporarily expand the playoff in 2020 because of all the Covid restrictions keeping most conferences from playing each other. The Covid restrictions have created a number of issues, not the smallest being no real way to measure the conferences vs each other, a rushed bowl season, and multiple group of five undefeated teams that can make an argument to be included as well as a P5 undefeated in USC that seems to have lost the argument. While it's quite clear the CFB missed a golden opportunity, the bigger issue is the question “Are the group of 5 automatically excluded no matter what” looms larger than when they snubbed the last “National Champion” to come out of the G5.

The CFP can no longer pretend that the G5 conferences are D1 any more than they can pretend that FCS schools are D1 like they used to. 2020 has sucked for a lot of reasons, but let's make something good come out of it, and that's an exciting and real college football playoff that exists for more than 7 teams.

I present to you Spize's 8-11-21 team 8 team college football bracket…

8 team playoff.

The bracket is essentially an 8 team playoff with six automatic bids seeded by rank, one at-large, and a four team play-in tournament. First, revert to the BCS six champions for automatic bids(B10, B12, SEC, PAC12, AAC, ACC). Second, we have to cover the independent teams (I'm looking at you Notre Dame) and/or the second SEC team ESPN is hyping that just couldn't manage to win or make the SEC title game because of their quality loss…. So an at-large spot so the CFP-ESPN committee can feel important. Finally, a four team playoff group of four (CUSA,MAC,MWC,SB) champions.

11 team playoff.

Including six automatic bids, one at large, and four group of four teams, it's actually 11 teams.

21 team playoff.

When you consider that there are 10 conferences with champions that have an auto-berth, their championship games are realistically playoff games which makes the playoff scenario involve 21 total teams in elimination format games.

Given this format gives every single FBS team a path to win their way into the playoffs, you can consider this proposal the “final expansion proposal”. This format also effectively eliminates the “How can you leave an undefeated team out of the playoff” question as well as the “Are the group of X teams really FBS if they aren't allowed in the playoff” question.

Bonus points: Since the first round is the last week of the season you can even consider giving the four losing teams in the round of eight auto-bids in the New Year's six games or use conference runner-ups to bring back conference bowl tie-ins.