I hope not. The idiots chose their wording specifically so they couldn't be accused of favoring the Power 5. Then their own greed destroyed the Power 5
Honestly to me it doesn't make much difference specifically because they went with a 12-team playoff.
If you look at my guess at the 12 teams based on 2023 with 2024 alignments, the best teams left out are:
- #10, 10-2 Penn State
- #11, 10-2 Ole Miss
- #12, 10-2 Oklahoma
- #13, 9-3 LSU
I generally agree with
@OrangeAfroMan that including BOTH Liberty Biberty AND SMU is unnecessary. However, I recognize that for political and legal (anti-trust) reasons you probably HAVE to reserve one seat for non-P5 (now P4) so I'd rather they drop it to five which would replace SMU with PSU in that example.
I still wish they'd gone with eight teams with the top-4 league champions hosting and with the new alignments I'd make it:
- The five highest ranked League Champions get auto-bids
- The next three highest ranked teams get in
- The Four highest ranked League Champions host the quarter-finals.
Under that model the 2023 rankings superimposed on the 2024 alignments would yield something like:
- Liberty Biberty at Michigan
- Georgia at Texas
- Bama at Florida State
- Washington at Arizona
The best teams left out would be:
- #7, 11-1 Ohio State
- #8, 11-2 Oregon
- #9 10-2 Mizzou
IMHO, the 8-team model is a better playoff and, more importantly, it creates a much more compelling regular season because a single loss might exclude you (Ohio State) or it forces you to play a road game in your opener instead of a home game (Georgia/Bama/Washington).
With the 12-team playoff even if they maintain the six slots for League Champions there is almost no chance of a 1-loss P4 team missing the playoff and 2-loss P4 teams are about 50/50.