The Group of Five playoff idea is terrible, and here’s why

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Oregon beat James Madison 51-34. Ole Miss throttled Tulane 41-10. Immediately, the same tired proposal resurfaced across sports media: create a separate playoff for Group of Five teams. Let them compete at “the appropriate level” while Power Four programs fight for the real championship.

The idea collapses under the slightest scrutiny.

Nobody would watch it

A separate Group of Five playoff would attract virtually no viewers. The FCS Championship between North Dakota State and Montana State drew 2.41 million viewers this year — impressive for FCS but less than a sixth of what Tennessee-Ohio State delivered in the CFP first round with 14.68 million. The entire FCS playoff postseason averaged just 1.3 million viewers across ESPN platforms, less than 10 percent of what a single CFP game delivers.

A Group of Five playoff would produce similar numbers, meaning Tulane and James Madison would compete in front of a fraction of the audience they just reached, playing for a championship everyone understands isn’t the real championship.

It wouldn’t even eliminate blowouts

Creating a separate tournament also wouldn’t eliminate the blowouts everyone complains about. You’d still have five conference champions competing against each other, with massive disparities in talent, resources, and depth. One team would dominate while the others would lose by similar margins to what we just saw. The format would simply move the problem to a different tournament that fewer people care about.

The championship would be celebrated for approximately 24 hours before everyone moved on to talking about the real playoff. The winner gets a trophy and a highlight package while the rest of the country keeps scrolling. Sports media would cover it the way they cover the NIT — perfunctorily, if at all.

The system is already evolving

That said, the current format isn’t permanent anyway. When conferences and Notre Dame agreed to the next CFP contract in March 2024, they guaranteed at least 12 teams starting in 2026 but expressed a strong preference for 14 teams. The memorandum of understanding guaranteed automatic bids to the ACC, Big Ten, SEC, and Big 12 champions, as well as the highest-ranked Group of Five champion.

That Group of Five slot isn’t going anywhere — at least not yet. The format details remain undecided, with the Big Ten and SEC holding most of the control, but the basic structure protects conference champions while creating more at-large spots for Power Four programs. By the time anyone could implement a separate Group of Five playoff, the current 12-team format will have evolved into something different anyway. We’re debating a solution to a problem that’s already being addressed through expansion.

Ask Boise State fans what actually matters

Here’s what the separate playoff advocates miss entirely, and it’s best expressed by someone who actually lived through what they’re proposing to eliminate:

Take it from a Boise State fan, there is no Group of 5 “national championship” that would ever hit like defeating a P4 program on a big stage.

— Jeremy Kawika (@JeremyKawika) December 21, 2025

Think about what Boise State actually means to college football. The program’s legacy wasn’t built in some hypothetical Mountain West championship tournament where they beat San Diego State and Fresno State year after year. It was built on Jan. 1, 2007, when a team from Idaho that nobody outside the Western Athletic Conference took seriously lined up against Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl and pulled off one of the greatest upsets in college football history. The hook-and-ladder. The Statue of Liberty in overtime. Ian Johnson proposing to his girlfriend on national TV. That game didn’t just put Boise State on the map — it redefined what people thought was possible for a program outside the traditional power structure.

Now imagine trying to tell someone who was in that stadium, or who was watching at home, that what would really make Boise State special is winning a Group of Five playoff championship against Tulane. Imagine trying to argue that beating Louisiana Tech in some side tournament would create the same kind of program-defining moment as going toe-to-toe with a blue blood and winning. It’s insulting to suggest those experiences are remotely comparable.

The same logic extends to every memorable Group of Five moment in the playoff era and before it. When UCF beat Auburn in the Peach Bowl to cap an undefeated season, it mattered because Auburn had just beaten Alabama and Georgia. When Utah destroyed Alabama in the 2009 Sugar Bowl, it mattered because they beat Nick Saban‘s team, not because they won the Mountain West. When Houston upset Oklahoma in 2016, it launched a conversation about whether the Cougars deserved a playoff spot. None of those moments exist in a world where Group of Five teams are shunted off to their own tournament.

Those wins are what these programs sell to recruits. Not “come here and compete for a championship that nobody outside our fanbase will care about.” They sell the possibility — however remote — that you could be the next Ian Johnson, that you could be part of something that shocks the college football world. They sell David versus Goliath, not David versus a slightly smaller David in a tournament that doesn’t make SportsCenter.

Even the losses can matter more than a separate championship, despite what Joel Klatt might think. James Madison getting obliterated by Oregon still meant their players competed on the biggest stage in college football, in front of 14 million people, and walked away with a playoff paycheck that benefits their entire athletic department. That’s worth more to a program’s long-term health than winning some separate tournament that airs opposite an NBA regular-season game and draws a fraction of the audience.

The separate playoff proponents would eliminate all of that. They’d replace the possibility of those transcendent moments with the certainty of irrelevance. They’d take programs that built themselves up specifically to compete against the big boys and tell them, “Actually, you should be happy competing against each other while the real teams play for the real championship.” They’d formalize a system where the ceiling for half of FBS is “best team nobody cares about.”

The same applies to every Group of Five program with aspirations beyond being patronized. UCF hung a “national championship” banner after going undefeated in 2017, and while it was treated as a joke by much of the media, it at least represented something real, which was a team that went undefeated and deserved consideration. A sanctioned Group of Five playoff wouldn’t even generate that level of conversation. It would be accepted as legitimate in the same way people accept the NIT as legitimate.

The winner would get a trophy and polite applause, and everyone would immediately go back to talking about the actual playoff.

James Madison didn’t build its program over the past decade to compete for a lesser championship that nobody outside Harrisonburg cares about. They moved up from FCS specifically to compete at the highest level. They want to recruit against Power Four schools by telling prospects they have a path to the actual playoff. They want their conference championships to mean something beyond “you’re the best team in a group we’ve decided doesn’t matter.”

The condescension is insulting

The worst part is the condescension embedded in the proposal. The separate playoff pitch frames itself as doing a favor to Group of Five programs. Let them compete at the appropriate level, give them something to play for, and they deserve their own championship. This is the language people use when they don’t want to admit they’re proposing relegation.

It’s the same energy as participation trophies, where everyone gets something so nobody has to feel bad, except in this case, what they’re getting is formal acknowledgment that they’re not good enough to compete with the big boys. Thanks, but no thanks.

A separate Group of Five playoff eliminates any pretense of competing for the same championship and formalizes the two-tier system everyone already suspects exists, where your tier is determined by which conference your school joined decades ago, based on geography and politics that have nothing to do with football. It would cement a permanent underclass in FBS football, where programs are told their ceiling is winning a tournament that doesn’t matter while watching everyone else compete for the real prize.

The current system is honest about what it is

The current system is imperfect. The alternative is worse. JMU-Oregon and Tulane-Ole Miss were not competitive games, and Tulane coach Jon Sumrall admitted afterward that his team “maybe didn’t help the critics.” First-round blowouts are a problem, particularly when the 5-seed and 6-seed both advance while the conference champions get boatraced.

But the current system at least maintains the principle that every FBS program competes for the same championship. Win your conference, and you have a shot. Lose your conference championship game, and you’d better hope the committee thinks you’re good enough to earn an at-large bid. That produces blowouts when the automatic qualifiers aren’t as good as the teams that get left out, but it’s honest about what the playoff is supposed to be: a competition to determine the national champion that includes representatives from every major conference.

The first-round games also generated massive audiences and significant revenue that flows back to the Group of Five conferences. Tulane and James Madison each received millions from their playoff appearances. Their conferences benefited. Their athletic departments benefited. Their programs gained national exposure that will help with recruiting for years to come. None of that exists in a separate Group of Five playoff that airs on ESPN2 at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.

Just say you want them in the FCS

A separate Group of Five playoff abandons the principle of unified competition entirely. Some schools compete for the real championship while others compete for a consolation prize, and we all pretend that’s fair because at least everyone gets to play for something. College football already has a version of that system in the FCS playoffs, which work perfectly fine for programs at that level.

If the proposal is that Group of Five programs should drop down to FCS to compete at “the appropriate level,” then just say that. Don’t dress it up as creating opportunities or giving these programs something to play for. Be honest that you’re proposing relegation and think programs like Boise State, Tulane, Memphis, and James Madison should compete in a lower division.

At least that would be intellectually honest instead of pretending a separate playoff does these programs a favor.

The real problem won’t go away

The debate about Group of Five access will continue as long as the playoff exists, but the solution isn’t building a separate tournament that nobody will watch while pretending it’s doing those programs a favor. The solution is to admit that college football has always been about money and conference affiliation, and that the playoff was never going to fix that.

The current format tried to balance inclusion with competition and satisfied nobody. Whatever format comes next will try the same thing with different math, and in five years, everyone will be arguing about the same issues because the fundamental problem remains. Some schools have more money, better recruits, and decades of built-in advantages that have nothing to do with what happens on the field.

A separate Group of Five playoff doesn’t solve that. It just makes it official. It takes the inequality that everyone understands exists and codifies it into the structure of college football itself, ensuring that programs outside the Power conferences can never do what Boise State did, can never shock the world on a big stage, can never prove they belong.

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