College Football Playoff Page 9 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

First-look CFP rankings: Rocky Top on top while Big Blue is singing the blues
The initial College Football Playoff rankings were released Tuesday, and as usual, a few fanbases came away upset. However, one long-struggling group of orange-clad supporters walked away ecstatic. The Tennessee Volunteers saw their name atop the heap, and in the history of the CFP, only one team ra...

3 SEC teams in the College Football Playoff? Here’s how that could happen
I heard your collective sighs when reading the headline and kicker to this story. Great, the most dominant conference in the country only hoards a bigger portion of the most exclusive quartet in college football. How could that be good for the sport? Calm down, Tommy. (what I’m choosing to call the ...

Those seeking College Football Playoff clarity this weekend should think again
This year more than others in recent memory seems to have a lot of standout teams. It feels like the top 10 squads have evaded missteps that they might normally fall prey to. We saw the Tide escape against Texas A&M, Georgia overcome a brain fart against Mizzou, USC barely get by Oregon State, the V...

Don’t celebrate just yet, SEC fans, there’s another independent who could claim a CFP bid
For the segment of college football fans who blackout with anger every time Notre Dame makes the College Football Playoff, this season could not have started better. Marcus Freeman’s team came up short against Ohio State and then stumbled trying to get back up against Marshall, and there’s really no...

Here comes The Sun...Belt
There’s a lot of uncertainty around college football right now as it looks like the landscape of the sport is forever changing. Texas and Oklahoma are joining the SEC. USC and UCLA are joining the Big 10. It looks like we’re headed toward two super conferences that will be the top tier, and then the...

College Football Playoff expanding to 12 teams in 2026
The College Football Playoff is expanding, finally. After a decade of a four-team tournament to determine the FBS national champion, the field is tripling starting by the 2026 season. Per ESPN’s Pete Thamel, the CFP Board of Managers approved the addition of eight teams to the annual postseason clas...

Desmond Howard… explain yourself
College football season kicks off today and already people are looking to the future, making predictions for conference championships and national titles. Some of these takes are scalding hot....

We’re on the precipice of the NCAA's death
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But one day — and one day we’re all likely to still be alive for, depending on your cholesterol and financial status, because as we know, the rich die old and comfortable here. And it won’t be the complete end of the NCAA, as long as it holds the keys to the bask...

The AP preseason poll is in! College football is almost here
People, we are less than two weeks away from real football. In 12 days, games will be on television, and will be played in various parts of America — not just Birmingham — and I assume players can keep their scholarships if they don’t want to eat chicken salad at the hotel....

Predicting college football’s New Year’s Six teams
College football starts in a little more than two weeks. And for 135 days, the jostling to become a national champion will be ongoing. Obviously, only four teams will compete in the College Football Playoff but a dozen teams will be selected to the most lucrative bowls, otherwise known as the New Ye...

Moving to a 16-team College Football Playoff isn’t easy — but may very well happen
“Sixteen just seems to be out there,” Gene Smith, Ohio State’s athletic director, said at the Big Ten media days. “You can’t ignore it.”...

Our Conference Mock Draft: ACC Edition
This new ACC is all about the show. We kept a couple of rivalries but our main goal is to entertain you. There are Hurricanes, Badgers, three different Tigers, and some of the most annoying people on the planet wearing their stupid scarlet. So lean back in your drop top, and turn on the 8 Ball & MJG...

Look out 'Bama and Ohio State, this Pac-12 power is back and looking championship-worthy
USC football is back. ...

We fixed the college conferences... you're welcome
The irony of all the bellyaching about constant player movement and the free market from the NCAA and its institutions is that they aren’t even loyal to their conference partners. Those same athletic programs get a buck dangled in front of them and dive into a national conference transfer portal of ...

The real winner in college conferences realignments might be… the airlines?
The smart ones are making sure that the staff at their schools have their frequent flier numbers on file. The geniuses are trying to secure NIL deals with the airlines....

The SEC is still better
There’s a confident nature among the collective of Southeastern Conference fan bases, and what their conglomerate represents. Having covered the league as a hometown beat writer for one of the oddball geographic teams in the league, Mizzou, and therefore having traveled to many of the other cities a...

Predicting the future NCAA landscape
As we approach an era where USC kicking off at 9 a.m. Pacific time in freezing November East Lansing temperatures is a very realistic and potentially biennial situation, let’s look at the options for college athletics going forward....

College football anarchy is creating more have nots than haves
The road to the College Football Playoff got more direct Wednesday with an announcement from the NCAA that conferences with at least 12 members were no longer required to decide their football champions by splitting its league into two divisions and the winners compete in a conference championship g...

Your heart goes out to Tarik Cohen after more tough news
What happened to Tarik Cohen is part of the game. Whatever you might consider the game to be. Whether it’s just professional athletes — especially football players — being more susceptible to bodily injury than those who don’t move at 99 miles per hour aiming for each others’ chests to earn a living...

The NFL’s schedule release is dumb. Here’s how to revamp it
The NFL strives to become a year-round player in the professional sports attention economy. After years of being stuffed in their lockers between May and July by the NBA, the doofuses in the NFL’s league office figured the best way to get fans talking about their product in the offseason was to anno...