College football has spent two years convincing itself that the 12-team playoff was the right call, and the sport’s loudest skeptic thinks the coverage that followed has only made the next bad idea easier to sell.
Paul Finebaum has been waging a one-man war against expanding the College Football Playoff to 24 teams since the proposal picked up serious momentum this spring, calling it “utterly ridiculous” and an access grab dressed up as progress, one that would hand postseason berths to 8-4 teams who have no business being there and reduce the most compelling regular season in American sports to a months-long warmup act.
On Thursday’s The Paul Finebaum Show, he turned his attention to what two seasons of the expanded format have already revealed about the people covering it. The 12-team field gave programs that would have been watching from home under the old format a seat at the table, and a corner of the college football media has spent two years treating that seat as the destination rather than the starting point.
“We’ve got a lot of stupid people covering college football,” Finebaum said on his eponymous show. “If you make the playoffs, they’re going to prop you up more. You heard it last year with ‘Tennessee, made it, Alabama made it.’ It doesn’t matter what happened after they made it. I think it does matter. I think that should be the minimum. You think Kirby Smart in a 24-team playoff is going to be happy if they lose in the first game? Of course not. And neither are the Georgia fans.”
The coverage problem and the expansion problem — driven by the Big Ten — are the same problem, according to Finebaum, who has been making that case all spring. There is a reasonable counter to his media criticism, of course. The sport has more than 130 teams and one title, and for many of them, a first-round appearance is genuinely something worth celebrating. Just not for the programs Finebaum spends most of his time talking about.
The CFP committee has until Dec. 1 to decide on any format changes for 2027, and if the field does reach 24, the so-called “stupid people” covering college football will have twice as many first-round exits to celebrate.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.