*** Washington vs Michigan 2024 FB natty game ***

[exCyDing]

Just my opinion but the start of the playoff in 2014 to 2020/2021 was the worst “era” of college football. That’s when you really started to seeing all the top recruits consolidated to 3-4 teams (Bama,tOSU,Georgia) and it reflected with the playoffs largely producing reoccurring matchups with an outlier each year.

Now the same 10-15 teams still are getting the top recruits but with the portal you start to see some of these guys moving on for playing time and money. Some go to the same blue chip programs some moving to smaller programs.

College football historically hasn't seen long runs with multiple teams ending the season ranked in the top 4 year after year like we've seen the last 10. In all, 15 different schools made the 10 CFPs, with three schools (Bama, Clemson and tOSU) taking 19 of the 40 total bids. 6 schools got almost 75% of the bids (add Oklahoma, GA and MI).

Compared to the prior 10 years, there was very little churn at the top. From 2004-2013, 21 different schools were in the AP top 4 after conference championships. Maybe the AP isn't the best parallel, since the CFP committee was a lot more centralized and had the latitude to do whatever (it wasn't officially a rule that the SEC had to get a bid or Ohio St should get one whenever possible), but it's a close approximation.