If college football keeps drifting toward a 24-team playoff, the sport is going to spend a lot of time pretending it still values the regular season while quietly proving the opposite.
Sports Illustrated highlighted Mario Cristobal’s comments from this week on the growing expansion debate, and the most useful part of his argument was how little fluff he put around it. He said he is not for a 24-team playoff, questioned why the sport would grind through a regular season just to let half the country in anyway, and pushed back on the broader idea of automatic bids deciding too much. That is not fear of change talking. That is a coach describing what the sport starts to lose when it keeps trying to sell more inventory as progress.
More playoff games sound fun in a vacuum. They also come attached to more roster strain, more calendar distortion and even less breathing room for programs trying to manage high school recruiting, transfer portal movement and postseason prep at the same time. A coach on a title path does not get to pause the rest of the sport while he finishes the season. The rest of the sport keeps moving, and that is exactly the issue Cristobal pointed out.
One of the reasons college football matters so much every season is that the margin has always felt thin. A bigger playoff can preserve access, which is a fine, but there is a point where it also starts cheapening the urgency of a potential loss. It makes Saturdays feel different from every other sport. Cristobal’s “why play a regular season” line may sound blunt, but it gets right to the point.
Cristobal argued for a structure that protects the season and fixes the timing. He offered a more serious contribution than a lot of the public chatter around this topic, which tends to flatten everything into “more is better” or “leave it alone.” Cristobal is talking like someone who has actually had to coach through the messier parts of the system. He called out the part a lot of people around the sport know is true: if you keep expanding the field without fixing the calendar, you are not making college football cleaner or fairer. You are just making it longer, louder and harder to manage.
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