The World Cup just handed college football the perfect expansion blueprint, and the power-conference commissars are busy shredding it so they can protect their little fiefdoms.
Cape Verde. Congo DR. Early-round draws that felt like body blows. Knockout near-misses against Argentina that made half the planet lose its mind. FIFA went to 48 teams and the product didn’t get watered down. It got louder. It got messier. It got better. Pure March Madness energy for a month, underdogs with half their rosters balling in Europe’s top leagues, and almost no dead nights. I ate every second of it.
That is what real expansion looks like. Access first. Chaos as a feature. The floor rises, the law of averages kicks in, and suddenly the 40th-best team on the planet can ruin your weekend. Gianni Infantino sold the bigger tournament as more of the world getting to dream, and for once the man wasn’t just chasing votes and TV money. The early weeks proved him right.
Now look at what Tony Petitti and the Big Ten-SEC cartel are cooking for the College Football Playoff. A 24-team field that guarantees the top 23 spots to the usual blue-blood suspects and tosses one lonely Group of 5 program a participation trophy. That is not a road map. That is a velvet rope with better production value. One autobid for the entire American, Sun Belt, Mountain West, and friends while Ohio State collects first-round byes on autopilot. L energy. No aura. Pure protection racket.
I know what you’re about to type. “Calendar!” “Regular-season integrity!” “We can’t finish four rounds before February as it is!” Cool. Post it. Tag me. Those are solvable problems if the people writing the checks actually want solutions instead of cover stories. Flex the conference title games. Seed by strength of schedule so an 11-1 Boise State isn’t punished for existing. Start the damn thing a week earlier and stop pretending the NFL draft calendar is sacred scripture. None of that requires turning the playoff into a closed shop for the same six brands.
The World Cup worked because the gap between good and elite has shrunk. Same thing is happening in college football whether the commissioners admit it or not. NIL, the portal, smarter staffs, kids who can actually throw and cover. A well-coached 10-2 Group of 5 team is not a free win anymore. Give those programs a real on-ramp and you get the same breathless December that made Cape Verde feel like a superpower for 90 minutes. Keep them locked out and the product slowly turns into the same heavyweight parade every January while the rest of the sport watches from the parking lot.
What Petitti is proposing is the opposite of the energy that made this World Cup unskippable. It is glazing the blue bloods and calling it competitive balance. It is pretending the regular season still matters while handing mulligans to every 8-4 SEC and Big Ten team that remembered to show up for rivalry week. We already found the sweet spot at 12. Expanding without expanding access is just greed wearing a playoff hat.
I loved the bigger World Cup for the exact reason the proposed CFP expansion makes me sick: one felt open and the other feels locked. Steal the soccer playbook. More teams. Real pathways for the little guys. First-round land mines. The blue bloods will still hoist most of the trophies. They did in the World Cup too. But the ride gets better for everybody, and the sport stops smelling like a country club that only lets the help in for the group photo.
So what’s it going to be? World Cup chaos that actually grows the game, or another power-conference protection plan dressed up as progress? Don’t lurk. Pick a side.
