Bigger college football playoffs already exist. So what can FBS learn from FCS and beyond?

If the idea of ​​further expanding the College Football Playoffs feels like heresy in a sport defined by the regular season, it isn’t. Brackets with more than 24 teams have existed in college football for years.

You only have to look at the lower levels of the NCAA to find them.

The Football Championship Subdivision play-offs have included 24 teams since 2013. The fields are even larger in Division II (32 teams) and Division III (40 teams).

Granted, the top Football Bowl subdivision is different because it has bigger brands, bigger rosters, bigger players, bigger budgets and (often) longer seasons than all the others. Its postseason history was built around bowls (hence the name), while FCS has had a playoff since its founding in 1978, when it was known as Division I-AA.

But as FBS approaches its next milestone in potential expansion while debating the 24-team model that all but the SEC now endorse, we reached out to coaches who have been in the FCS, D-II and D-III playoffs. How was their experience? How do they think it would work at the FBS? Is this a good idea?

Here are six lessons from lower divisions that resonate at the highest level:

1. The regular season still matters

The biggest concern about the CFP expansion – expressed this week by SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey – is that doubling the current field of 12 teams will dilute the regular season. A top-10 matchup in November won’t mean much if both teams are already headed to the Playoff, so what’s to stop either team from resting or relaxing their starters?

“That’s not happening,” said California (Pa.) head coach Gary Dunn, whose playoff resume includes four D-II runs for the Vulcans, an FCS appearance as a Duquesne assistant and a second-round win over Curt Cignetti in 2016.

It’s not just Dunn. None of the coaches we spoke to said they had fielded a healthy player for a regular-season game.

For coach Chris Keevers of the University of Indianapolis, the top games feel no different.

“If you want to make sure you’re in the playoffs, you have to beat those teams. That hasn’t changed,” said Keevers, who has made four consecutive D-II playoff appearances with the Greyhounds. “Having more teams in the playoffs hasn’t diluted the regular season. You have a little more wiggle room, yes, but I don’t feel like it has changed the competitiveness of a regular season game.”

That’s because home field advantage and byes are valuable enough to keep the stakes high in games that might seem irrelevant, like Stephen F. Austin’s regular-season finale last November.

SFA had already clinched the Southland Conference title and an FCS playoff berth regardless of what happened at 1-10 Northwestern State. But the Lumberjacks were ranked among the top 15 and were competing for one of eight first-round byes, so they were incentivized to keep pushing. SFA led 48-0 at halftime in a blowout win that helped earn a bye and proved the point of Louisiana Tech offensive coordinator Nathan Young (a former Lumberjacks assistant).

“I think at the end of the regular season it actually has more value than it devalues ​​you,” said Young, who played and coached in the D-II playoffs at Abilene Christian.

2. Rivalry still resonates

The Monon Bell Rivalry doesn’t have the national atmosphere of Ohio State-Michigan or the Iron Bowl, but it has a long history (the first game was in 1890) and is of great importance to DePauw and Wabash, a pair of D-III schools 30 miles apart in Indiana. If anything, a bigger bracket made the game even bigger.

Their 2023 meeting on the final weekend of the regular season decided the conference championship and a playoff appearance for the second straight year. Imagine the reaction when DePauw blocked a field goal in the first overtime, scored a walk-off touchdown in the second and stormed his rival’s field to celebrate a trophy victory And play-off berth.

“That’s a special one,” DePauw coach Brett Dietz said.

What about the years in which the title of the conference has already been determined? Dietz faced that situation in 2021. His Tigers lost their final 42-35, but it wasn’t because they rested anyone healthy enough to play or tried to get into the postseason. Wabash simply stormed back with four touchdowns in the final twenty minutes.

“All our kids want to play that game, right?” Dietz said. “Most of them would disagree if it was a healthy scratch.”

3. Goodbyes are more important than you think

A first-round bye hasn’t helped FBS teams. Since the CFP expanded to twelve teams two seasons ago, Indiana is the only team to have a bye and win the first game (the rest are 0-7).

However, it was an advantage in bigger playoffs at lower levels.

“It’s huge. Huge,” said North Dakota State head coach Tim Polasek, a five-time FCS national champion (four as assistant, one as head coach). “When November came, we now started talking about play-off football, and positioning is important. Every one of these photos will matter, will have an impact, whether or not we get the chance to lift a trophy.”

The current FBS schedule allows for a long break between the conference championships and the quarterfinals for those with a bye — 25 days last year in the case of Indiana, Georgia and Texas Tech. At lower levels it is a week off. That’s enough time for bodies to heal, but not so much time that rust develops.

The data supports that. As the FCS field grew to more than 16 for the 2010 season, each national champion started with a bye in the first round. Only two teams that played in Round 1 have even made it to the title game: Youngstown State in 2016 and Illinois State last season.

Since the D-II field expanded to 28 in 2015, three national champions have won without a bye. That’s enough to show an advantage without it being an insurmountable advantage.

For Dietz and DePauw, ending the regular season with a rivalry game makes a week off even more important.

“Our kids are coming off a physically demanding and emotionally draining game,” Dietz said, “then you have to turn around and play a playoff game right after that, which will have fewer fans.”

Indiana won the second version of the CFP with 12 teams. The Big Ten and others are already pushing to double the size of the bracket. (Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

4. The right system rewards a strong scheme

After California (Pa.) went 9-1 in 2021 but still missed the D-II playoffs, Dunn realized the culprit was a relatively weak schedule.

“Then we changed our schedule to try to find the best out-of-conference opponent we could have,” Dunn said.

Last year, his Vulcans earned a big berth thanks in part to a pair of non-conference wins over ranked teams Charleston and Frostburg State. Charleston is also on the schedule this season.

The calculation is similar at UIndy. Because the Great Lakes Valley Conference is not a powerhouse, Keevers is looking for strong opponents outside the league to strengthen his Greyhounds’ resume if they don’t earn an automatic berth. Last year, UIndy split a pair of matchups between teams that finished in the top 20 (Ashland and Findlay).

Their philosophies clash with an FBS trend of questioning, if not cutting, high-profile nonconference series (USC-Notre Dame, Alabama-Oklahoma State). For Dunn, the key is that the criteria and metrics explicitly highlight the strength of the schedule, whether it’s results against teams with a winning record, opponents’ winning percentages or quality wins.

“If the strength of the schedule isn’t a big part of that,” Dunn said, “then you’re going to see a lot of those early games go away that everyone would like to see go away.”

5. The long season is right

This was the biggest concern raised by coaches.

Furman’s Clay Hendrix mentioned the strain this has on academics at his private FCS school. Keevers has adapted UIndy’s practice methods to protect players’ health as the playoff field doubled there over the past three decades.

Although D-II (11 games) and D-III (10 games) have shorter regular seasons than the FBS, the larger postseason means national finalists can still play a total of 16 games. Last year’s FCS runner-up, Illinois State, played seventeen.

Even if conference championships end at the FBS level, national champions will play 16 or 17 games in a 24-team bracket. Last season, Indiana became the first major program in more than a century to go 16-0.

“At some point the revenue from the games decreases,” Keevers said. “They have limited rosters. You don’t get free agents. You can’t get all those guys on waivers. If they’re dead after the regular season, it won’t work.”

Even if a team makes it through one long season, what about the next? Polasek witnessed these residual effects as North Dakota State built a dynasty, playing at least 15 games in 12 seasons since 2011.

“When we had to play fifteen and sixteen games there five years in a row, it had a big impact on the fifth-year seniors and fourth-year juniors, the amount of tread left on the tires,” Polasek said. “And we had to be very careful about managing those guys.”

Polasek said programs should change the way they structure their workouts so players are big and strong enough to make it through a longer season without becoming overworked.

6. The new system will not be perfect

Whatever format a potential 24-team CFP adopts, expect unintended consequences. Planning is one of the reasons for this.

“I know in FCS there will always be teams with good results because someone will follow the schedule well,” said Hendrix, who has led Furman to the playoffs four times as head coach and won the league title as an assistant there in 1988.

With bloated FBS conferences, a team can fall into a weak schedule and stumble toward a league title (especially if there is no championship game as a backstop). There’s no perfect way to balance that team’s record with a fluke of games.

Another factor several coaches brought up: The Missouri Valley Football Conference has earned 16 of 72 FCS playoff berths over the past three seasons, leading to some MVFC fatigue. It’s easy to see the SEC or Big Ten (or both) regularly doing the same thing at the FBS level. How will other conferences and fans react if a larger group only creates the illusion of inclusion?

Expansion will solve some of the problems by guaranteeing a spot for the next version of Notre Dame of 2025 — a two-loss team that was good enough to contend for a title but shaky enough to end up on the wrong side of the bubble. But doubling the field will only shift the goalposts of the debate.

“If you go to 24,” Hendrix said, “there will always be a number 25.”