Final CFP Bracket Raises New Wave of Questions and Controversies

A day after the release of the 2025 College Football Playoff brackets, recriminations continue to fly around the sport, prompting plenty of additional questions of how the selection committee arrived at the 12-person field, and what might happen in future years as a result.

Among the key questions looking ahead in the wake of the 2025 bracket:

What happens with the bowl system? 

The existing set of bowls happening outside the CFP is unquestionably in a weaker position. Notre Dame, the top team left out of the CFP, opted out of competing in any bowl game. So did Kansas State and Iowa State, each receiving $500,000 fines from the Big 12 Conference because of those decisions. 

Baylor, which hadn’t been bowl eligible with a 5–7 record, also saw a potential bid to the Birmingham Bowl fall its way because of the other opt-outs, only to decline themselves. Georgia Southern finally got an opponent in that game, Appalachian State, after at least seven teams declined an invitation. 

“We’ve already progressed deeply into the offseason timeline in preparation for the 2026 season,” Baylor said in a statement.

Such is increasingly the situation with teams not in the CFP as the tournament increasingly becomes an all-or-nothing proposition—to the detriment of the existing bowls.

“The bowl system we know now is officially dead,” On3 tweeted. “RIP. It was a nice run while it lasted.”

That still might be somewhat hyperbolic, though, as there’s still plenty of consumer interest in the bowls. ESPN, which shows many of the lesser bowls potentially most at risk, reported a series of audience milestones last January to end the 2024–25 season, with some events posting record-level viewership. What happens in the next several weeks on ESPN and its sister networks will provide a key litmus test on the future of the bowl games.

Did the weekly CFP rankings show hurt?

That’s the core allegation of Notre Dame, which said the weekly programs showing the Fighting Irish in the tournament until the final, decisive reveal provided “false hope,” according to athletic director Pete Bevacqua. 

The CFP, however, is locked into five rankings reveal shows as part of its rights deal with ESPN. 

The core issue, however, likely has less to do with the existence of the shows themselves, but more with the rankings unveiled on those shows and how they’re determined.

So what happens with the CFP rankings?

That’s the fundamental issue plaguing the CFP, both in its current 12-team format and a proposed 16-team one. As fighting continues over how to allocate automatic bids—consistently the thorniest issue in the CFP expansion discussion—subjective evaluations of teams continue to roil the sport, just as they did in the pre-CFP era.

Miami and its advocates, not surprisingly, leaned heavily on the weight of its head-to-head victory back in August over Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish, conversely, argued for its entire body of work, its strength of schedule, and a sizable on-field improvement since that early loss, and one two weeks later to Texas A&M. 

Even CFP chair Hunter Yurachek acknowledged Sunday that the presence of last week’s conference championship games—which carried different meanings for various teams and weren’t played at all by some contenders—additionally complicated the selection process.

“That’s a process in consideration,” Yurachek said of potentially discounting the title games in future years. “The role of the selection committee is to rank the teams 1 through 25 and then from that you develop your College Football bracket with the five highest-ranked conference champions and the seven highest at-large teams. So that’s what we do until the management committee tells us to do something different.”

What happens to the Group of Six teams?

This remains one of the most hotly debated components of any future CFP format, and pressure will likely increase to further ensure that teams from power conferences have clear paths to the CFP. That will continue to run against those arguing for a more open framework.

The current structure, as it was intended, created a pathway for Tulane and James Madison to enter the tournament. Plenty of pundits, however, believe that such teams, far from the sport’s elite, do not belong in the field.

“We can’t be doing a Make-A-Wish program with the College Football Playoff and just adding teams because we believe we feel like they should deserve it,” said ESPN analyst Jordan Rodgers on Monday’s episode of Get Up.