Urban Meyer bemoans ‘awful’ and ’embarrassing’ first-round CFP games

Urban Meyer watched the first round of the College Football Playoff and came away with one word to describe it: awful.

During the most recent episode of his The Triple Option podcast with Rob Stone and Mark Ingram II, the former Ohio State and Florida coach didn’t hold back about James Madison getting blown out by Oregon 51-34 and Tulane losing to Ole Miss 41-10, calling the whole situation “embarrassing” for college football and “unfair” to everyone involved.

“It was awful,” Meyer said of the first-round slate. “It’s really not fair to have those two teams — James Madison and Tulane… It’s not the best 12 teams in America. It’s really not even close, to be honest with you. I guess what’s amazing to me is what did you expect? You know, and maybe there’d be a gigantic upset or something like that, but to throw those guys out there and say, ‘OK, you guys are gonna fly across [the country] and play at Oregon,’ I’m just not a fan of it. And when I saw it hit, I thought it’s really not fair to the players involved, it’s not fair to the coach, and it’s certainly not fair to the two teams that were left out.”

“It was awful.”@CoachUrbanMeyer on the first round of the #CFBPlayoff @nhtsagov #drivesober pic.twitter.com/NwrVipudX4

— The Triple Option (@3xOptionShow) December 24, 2025

Meyer isn’t the first person to question whether Group of Five teams belong in the playoff after watching them get outclassed in the first round. The blowouts sparked the same debate that happens every time a G5 team loses badly, with people arguing that winning your conference shouldn’t matter as much as playing in the right league.

The Big Noon Kickoff analyst proposed his own fix, saying Group of Five teams should have to play three top-50 programs during the regular season so the committee actually has something to evaluate.

“When I was at Utah, we beat A&M badly, we beat Arizona, beat Cal, beat Oregon,” Meyer said. “You know, I would force those if they want to have that conversation — and I said this two weeks ago — they have to play three perennial top-50 teams. That’s fluid because it changes, but you have to… because there’s no measuring stick. You can’t measure some of those other games and say, ‘What do you think this will look like?’ So, you have to play and compete with those [teams], so the committee can have a look and say, ‘OK, this is what this might look like,’ because it was kind of embarrassing for college football to have that happen.”

Meyer’s Utah team went undefeated in 2004, with wins over power conference opponents like Texas A&M and Arizona, making it harder to dismiss them as frauds who just beat up on weak Mountain West competition. His argument is that if the Group of Five teams want playoff consideration, they need to prove they belong by actually beating quality opponents during the season, not just running the table against conference opponents that nobody respects.

The problem is that Meyer’s own example undermines his argument about the current system. That Utah team never got a chance to play for a national championship despite going undefeated and beating good teams. The whole point of expanding the playoff was supposed to be giving teams like that — and like Boise State, and like TCU — an actual path to competing for a title instead of being shut out by the BCS formula that valued conference affiliation over everything else.

But Meyer’s not interested in debating whether the system is fair or whether Group of Five teams deserve a shot. He just wants someone to admit the current setup doesn’t work.

“I want to have someone to stand up and own it and say, ‘That was my fault for doing that.’ Of course, they’ll never do that,” he said. “Because I keep asking who wrote that rule?”

The answer is that plenty of people wrote that rule, including conference commissioners who negotiated the playoff format and agreed that conference champions from across the FBS should have access. Whether they’ll change it after watching JMU and Tulane get boat-raced remains to be seen. But next year’s format adjustments already make it less likely two Group of Five teams end up in the field at once.