The College Football Playoff is not being discussed as a small tweak anymore. It is being pushed toward a full-scale rewrite, from 12 teams to 24, and Nick Saban and Tim Tebow made it plain on Saturday morning that they do not believe college football should go along quietly. In a sport that already struggles to explain itself every autumn, this is the kind of proposal that risks turning clarity into confusion.
Saban delivered the bluntest version of the argument on ’s College GameDay at BYU: people want to see the best teams in the Playoffs, and he does not think there are 24 teams in the country that deserve to be there. He went even further, saying he does not think there are 24 teams that can win the championship. That is the heart of the resistance. If the playoff is supposed to identify a true national title contender, then stretching the field that far begins to look less like inclusion and more like dilution.
Tim Tebow made the same broad point from a different angle on the SEC Network. His criticism was less about the math and more about the damage to the sport’s identity. “We changed the goal posts,” he said, arguing that the old standard rewarded consistency across the season, while the new version would reward simply getting in and getting hot at the right time. His concern was clear: college football loses something when the regular season stops carrying so much weight.
Why this matters for Sec Standings Football
This is where the conversation stops being abstract and starts affecting the way fans read SEC standings and every other conference race. If the postseason keeps expanding, then the importance of each Saturday starts to shift. Tebow said the regular season is one of the biggest reasons college football stands apart from other sports, and he is right to worry that a bigger field weakens that edge. If teams can absorb more losses and still get in, the urgency that makes September and October matter begins to fade.
Saban framed the same concern in even harsher terms. He said bowl games are going to be a thing of the past and warned that something would be gained, but something would also be given up. He also said there would be no SEC Championship Game now, which tells you exactly how disruptive this proposal could be to the sport’s existing structure. For a conference built on high-stakes weekends, that is not a minor side effect. That is the point.
There is a reason this debate keeps producing the same objections. The 12-team format was already enough to make people question what the regular season was worth, and the source notes that bowl games had already been devalued after the NCAA introduced that setup and NIL deals reshaped the sport’s incentives. A leap to 24 teams would only intensify that tension. The more access you create, the less punishment there is for inconsistency, and the less unique the regular season becomes.
That is why Saban and Tebow’s comments land. They are not just defending tradition for nostalgia’s sake. They are warning that college football risks losing the very thing that made it different. The best teams should still matter. The regular season should still matter. And if the sport keeps expanding the playoff just because it can, it may discover that bigger is not always better.
