Joel Klatt defends 24-team college football playoff and calls out committee’s SEC bias

Joel Klatt concedes 24 teams may not all be title contenders; his case is that the playoff era left most programs with no other way to count a season as a win

BY DENVER SPORTS

Nov 11, 2026, 10:55 AM

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Since the first four-team playoff in 2014, college football has given most of its programs one measure of a good season: make the field or don’t.

Joel Klatt thinks that is the real problem, and that a bigger bracket is the fix.

On his weekly visit with “Stokley and Evans with Mark Schlereth,” Klatt, a college football analyst and regular guest, made his case for the expansion to 24 teams. He knows where the public stands.

“I know it’s unpopular,” he said.

The squeezed middle

Klatt opens with a concession. He agrees that 24 teams may not all be good enough to win the national championship. But in his view, that isn’t the point.

His argument is that the sport has lost its tiers of success. College football once had teams chasing the title, then New Year’s Day bowls and other top-tier bowl games, each a way to call a season a win. The playoff era, he said, shoved all of that definition into the playoff spots.

“You can’t define yourself as successful unless you’re in the playoffs,” Klatt said.

The cost shows up in scheduling, he said. Programs are investing in players and selling season tickets while the chance to measure success is being taken away. Because of the way teams are ranked, he said, non-conference schedules are being hollowed out.

“Nobody wants to play anybody because of the way that we rank teams,” Klatt said.

A wider field, he believes, brings better non-conference slates, more fan bases with hope and more meaningful November games for more teams.

A regular season already diminished

The standard objection is that expansion cheapens the regular season. Klatt calls that a moot point. People make the argument, he said, in the same week a playoff committee ranks a two-loss SEC team above an undefeated Big Ten team.

His image for it is blunt.

“We are longing for an era where the toothpaste is already out of the tube and we can’t put it back in,” Klatt said.

The committee’s feedback loop

The same rankings supply Klatt’s other complaint. He calls Georgia the best team and says Utah and UCLA are getting “crumbs.” He believes the committee is trapped in a loop.

“It’s pretty obvious to me and anybody else that has a brain that the college football playoff committee is in an SEC feedback loop,” Klatt said.

The mechanism, as he laid it out: the committee thinks the SEC is the best conference, so it over-ranks SEC teams. Games among those teams then carry more value, and the cycle feeds itself.

He backed it with numbers. Every SEC team in the committee rankings sits higher than in the AP poll, except Georgia, who can’t go higher, and Ole Miss at No. 19. Each SEC team from Georgia to Ole Miss is ranked one spot ahead of a non-SEC team with fewer losses. Georgia has one loss and Utah has none. Alabama has two and UCLA has none. Texas has two and Miami has one. Kentucky has two and Texas Tech has one.

Klatt said he wasn’t calling that good or bad. “That’s an observation,” he said, and the postseason will show whether it holds up.

What it turns on

The disagreement comes down to what a playoff is for. If it exists only to find the best team, 24 is hard to defend, and Klatt grants as much. If it exists to keep the sport’s middle class invested and give more fan bases something to play for in November, his case gets stronger.

Disclosure: This article was transcribed from our original audio content and edited for readability with the assistance of generative AI. The article has been reviewed by our editorial team prior to publication. Please watch or listen to the clip above for the full segment.