SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee knows that the current version of the College Football Playoff is a playoff in a name only. Last year, he spent the first week of December making a public case for his Mustangs’ inclusion in the 12-team field over a three-loss Alabama team, something that doesn’t happen in true playoffs. 

He points to every other level of football as proof. In the Texas high school playoffs, the top four teams in each district are guaranteed a spot in the field. It doesn’t matter if the fifth-best team in a loaded district would beat the champions in half of the other districts across the state. 

Similarly, it doesn’t matter if the ninth-best team in the AFC is better than one of the playoff teams in the NFC. It also doesn’t matter if a team has won the last three Super Bowls or is a big brand like the Cowboys.

Lashlee respects the committee and knows they have an impossible job, but he’d like to get away from any system that places so much value on subjective opinions. 

“Teams are selected or chosen like a pageant,” Lashlee explained. “A playoff is something you qualify for and you can only qualify if the things to get in are consistent and standard and everybody knows going in.”

Lashlee’s idea for the College Football Playoff is simple and straightforward, even if it is controversial. He’d move the field to 16 teams and guarantee spots for the top four teams in each Power Four conference. If a G5 team is ranked inside the Top 16 at year’s end, that program would bump the lowest-ranked fourth-placed team in the P4 out of the field. He knows it likely won’t happen, but he believes it is the best way to maintain competitive balance across the country and it removes any subjective measures from a group of people in a hotel somewhere in the Dallas Metroplex. 

“Nobody really wants to see a fifth-place team in a conference make the playoff for a national championship,” Lashlee asserted. “If your league is better than mine, fine, your three or four teams will do better than mine. Your nine-game conference championship was your playoff and you didn’t qualify if you’re fifth.”

But here is the problem facing the leadership of college football: no one agrees on the best path about anything, not even within the coaching community. Lashlee is one of three head coaches in Texas to qualify for the CFP alongside TCU’s Sonny Dykes and Texas’ Steve Sarkisian. Texas A&M’s Mike Elko and Texas Tech’s Joey McGuire will join that group this year. 

Dykes has a completely different idea for the CFP field. He’d split each conference into two divisions by geography. Like a Big 12 South and North and a Big Ten East and West. He’d do that for each of the Power Four conferences to formulate eight divisions across the P4. Teams in those divisions would play a round-robin schedule with two or three crossover games each season. That would preserve regionality and the rivalries that make college football special while also providing some travel relief in these bloated mega conferences. Dykes wants a 24-team field that guarantees a spot for the eight division champs. He’d then simply fill up the other 16 spots with the top-ranked teams in the country regardless of conference. 

Dykes would eliminate the conference championship games and make that weekend the first round of the CFP. The 16 at-large teams would play on campus with the higher seed hosting. Those eight winners would then face the eight division champions in the second round on the campus of the teams with the bye. That would leave eight teams and then those would play in bowls like the quarterfinals and semifinals are now. 

He doesn’t agree that balance between conferences should exist. He wants the highest-ranked teams in regardless of where they play. If that means seven SEC teams, so be it. 

“I love the Big 12, but this year, there were probably only two teams that deserved to get in. The ACC only has one team that deserves to get in,” Dykes said. “You can make the argument that there are several more than that who deserve it from the Big Ten and the SEC. It’s on us to catch up and earn it.”

So, where would that leave the G5 teams. Well, both Dykes and Lashlee have led programs in the G5. They believe that those teams should get a spot if they’re ranked high enough, but that nothing should be guaranteed. They both point to the transfer portal and revenue sharing as reasons that the G5 can no longer compete at the highest level. Dykes was 8-1 in his final nine games against the P4 as head coach at La Tech but he doesn’t believe that’s possible anymore. 

“There were teams in the G5 who could compete and win big games against the top of the P4, but now, these teams get raided every single year and the rosters just aren’t talented enough to compete,” Dykes said. “A team like Boise last year deserved their spot and they should get it, but this year there aren’t those types of teams and we shouldn’t take a spot from a team that could compete for a championship like Texas or Notre Dame just to be inclusive.”

The 12-team playoff tweaked the field after last season so the top four in the ranking get the bye into the quarterfinals rather than the four highest-ranked conference champions. The coaches expect more changes after this year, even if it isn’t a complete overhaul. 

“My guess is they’re going to expand the playoff to 16 and then put some type of minimum ranking requirement on the G5 champion that they have to be ranked in the top 16 or 20 or whatever to get in,” Dykes predicted. 

But where most coaches agree is on a calendar reset. McGuire has pitched the idea of moving the season up to start on Week 0, starting the playoff during conference championship week and then ending the year on Jan. 1 so that the sport doesn’t bleed into the spring semester. 

That would mean that the portal opening on Jan. 2 wouldn’t be in the middle of the season and maybe that would prevent coaching changes to happen during the playoff. Three of the 12 teams – Ole Miss, James Madison, and Tulane – won’t have the same head coach in 2026 as they did in 2025. 

“College football has changed more in the last four years than in the last 40 years, so it needs a total reboot,” Lashlee said. “The calendar does not fit how we play our sport anymore. Every year, we tweak a few things here and there and put Band-Aids on things but that is treating symptoms, not problems.”