(The Dallas Examiner) – For the first time, the NCAA will expand the College Football Playoff format from four teams to a 12-team bracket and seeding, which means more schools can compete for the national championship.

The new format will kick off this season for the 2024-2025 playoffs with the national championship team crowned at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on Jan. 20, 2025.

Rich Clark, executive director of the CFP, hosted a media webinar Oct. 30 showcasing the new bracket and seeding format.

“This new playoff is just spectacular, and I think it’s what college football has needed for a long time,” Clark said. “I think the commissioners put a lot of good thought into this and how this could happen. Some of the guiding principles that they had in mind were first access – providing greater access to more teams – so that we could see teams that traditionally we haven’t seen in the playoff hunt. And opening that up, I think, is really what college football needed. It inspires our student athletes. It gives them hope that they can get into the playoff – and their coaches and their fans. But I think it also gives the fans a lot of interest and excitement, because we’re going to be looking all the way into November, I think, to see who’s actually going to make it. And not only who’s going to make it, but where they’re going to be seeded.”

The CFP Selection Committee will determine who will get in and whose left out. The group is made of 13 members, six of which are new. They include six athletic directors and seven at-large members who are on the committee.

“The athletic directors come from and are spread out from all the different conferences,” Clark said. “The at large members are made up of journalists, made up former coaches, former players and people that are knowledgeable, and they’re picked because of their expertise in the game, the fact that they were involved in in athletics and particularly in college football, but also their temperament, their current stature and status and the landscape of college football, and we think we do a pretty good job of picking those folks that are going to come in and do a great job, because it’s not going to be easy. There’s a lot of things that they have to look at and consider in this selection process.”

Clark said the committee will be given iPads so they can watch as many games as possible before they start ranking the teams.

 “One of the things that’s really interesting to me is they watch so many games throughout the season. This weekend, we’ve provided them with an iPad which allows them to download games that are truncated. … They’re 45 minutes so that they can watch an entire game, and it basically cuts out all the in between time, time outs, time in between plays, but it allows them to go from play to play to play with every play being recorded. And they can watch a game in about 45 minutes. And that allows them to watch 12 to 15 games, with some of them watching 20 games in one weekend.”

He said while some coaches take advantage of the shortened version, there are some who prefer to watch entire games.

“They … will be up all night watching games,” he continued. “They love the film. They love to immerse themselves. And that’s sort of the beauty of this because they all watch the game with a different lens. The journalists watch the game in a different way than the coaches who watch it in a different way than the players, you know, the players who actually know the game. And the good thing is that they all bring their different perspectives to the table, and it makes for really rich discussions in the room when we’re deciding who’s wearing the ranking.”

The committee’s job is to, first, rank the top 25 teams in the country towards the end of season and give out the final ranking when the regular season ends. Afterward, they will select which teams make up the 12-team playoff bracket.

To determine who gets in, the following is a breakdown of how the playoff format will look as stated on the CFP website.

• The 12 participating teams will be the five conference champions ranked highest by the CFP selection committee, plus the next seven highest-ranked teams.
• The ranking of the teams will continue to be done by a selection committee.
• The four highest-ranked conference champions will be seeded one through four and will receive a first-round bye. The fifth conference champion will be seeded where it was ranked or at No. 12 if it is outside the top 12 rankings. Non-conference champions ranked in the top four will be seeded beginning at No. 5. Because of this, the seeding, 1 through 12, could look different than the final rankings.
• The eight teams seeded No. 5-12 will play in a first round with the higher seeds hosting the lower seeds either on campus or at other sites designated by the higher-seeded institution (No. 12 at No. 5, No. 11 at No. 6, No. 10 at No. 7 and No. 9 at No. 8.).
• The selection committee will assign the four highest-ranked conference champions to playoff quarterfinals hosted by bowls. This will be done in consideration of historic bowl relationships, then in consideration of rankings. For example, if the Sugar Bowl hosts a playoff quarterfinal and the SEC champion is ranked No. 1 and the Big 12 champion is ranked No. 3, the SEC champion would be assigned to the Sugar Bowl and the Big 12 champion would be assigned elsewhere.
• With the four highest-ranked conference champions assigned to bowls, their four playoff quarterfinal opponents will be dictated by the bracket (i.e., No. 1 vs. No. 8 or 9 winner, No. 4 vs. No. 5 or 12 winner, No. 2 vs. 7 or 10 winner; No. 3 vs. 6 or 11 winner.)
• The College Football Playoff bracket will follow the selection committee’s rankings, with no modifications made to avoid rematches between teams that may have played during the regular season or are from the same conference.
• The bracket will remain in effect throughout the playoff (i.e., no re-seeding).
• The highest seed will receive preferential placement for the playoff semifinal bowl assignment.
• All 11 games will be under the CFP umbrella with the administrative policies determined by the CFP.

“They have a lot of data that is at their fingertips,” Clark said. “They watched these games to give them an opportunity to put some judgment into it. They see what happens on the field. They see how these teams perform, and they bring that perspective to the room as well. So that job for them hasn’t changed. They still have to pick the 25 best teams in college football, rank them from week to week, then final week of rankings, after the conference championships. One of the other things that was really important to them was to honor conference champions. They want the conference championships to mean something.”

On Dec. 8, the selection committee will turn the final rankings into the playoff seeds and assign teams to the bracket.

Clark said this new format should open more doors for teams that seems to never get an opportunity – even those with a perfect record but are in a less known football club or weaker conference.

“I think the best thing we can assure fans of that is to help build some trust with the committee and what they’re going to do,” he said. The thing that’s really important here is the committee’s job is to pick the best teams, not based on their jersey, what they’re wearing, what conference they’re in, or even their record, right? But record still matters.”

Clark stated the goal is not to pick the most deserving teams but the best teams in college football where competition is so close with several schools only losing one or two games or none.

“This committee has got to look at their entire body of work. They’re going to consider records, wins and losses. But they’ve also got to look at strength of schedule. They’re going to look at head-to-head competitions and how teams perform against each other. They’re going to look at how they perform against common opponents as well. And then there’s just that eye test of, what did they do on the field? How did they perform, even at a loss, how did they perform? The beauty, I think, is that a loss early in the season may not completely derail a team, maybe it’ll change their seeding, maybe it’ll change their ranking, but it doesn’t completely derail them.

“It’s really hard to compare one conference with a team in one conference, or team in another, because they don’t have common opponents. But that strength to schedule metric is really sophisticated, and it not only looks at what your opponent’s records are, but it looks at what your opponent’s records are, so that it can come up with a way to evaluate the actual strength of schedule, and that goes into the mix. So I think fans just need to know that our committee is sophisticated. They have a very complex amount to look through, and that’s the size, but there’s an art to it, and they are an unbiased group that’s just trying to pick the best team.”