Danny Kanell played quarterback at Florida State way back in the mid-1990s, which was way before the College Football Playoff arrived on the scene.
There were calls for a playoff system even back then as each national champion was clouded in controversy seemingly every year, including the 1993 FSU championship team that Kanell was a part of.
It would take 2 more decades before those loud calls for some kind of playoff at college football’s highest level were put into action. Finally, in 2014, the sport’s way of determining its national champion got a needed facelift, as a 4-team College Football Playoff was instituted. The system was played out for a decade until last fall, when the 4-team format was expanded to 12 teams.
In 2024, Ohio State emerged as the first national champion of that new 12-team format, and surely everybody would go home happy with the 12-team deal. But this is college football, with rabid fan bases everywhere and super-opinionated fans who thirst for the perfect solution to determining a champion.
This thirst has produced varying proposals, led by the SEC and Big Ten, to give the CFP format yet another facelift. Kanell, now a CBS Sports college football analyst, has heard them all and he admitted on Tuesday that for some 15 years he was all in on expanding the Playoff as much as possible.
But people are allowed to change their opinions, and now Kanell has voiced his fresh take: Pushing the Playoff past 12 teams after just 2 years in this newest format would be too “rushed and irrational.”
“I am now anti-expansion. Let’s keep it at 12,” Kanell wrote on his social media account on Tuesday.
Kanell’s new opinion probably won’t be too popular with the college football masses who seemingly always want more teams in the Playoff fight.
But Kanell is saying in effect, “pump the brakes” and let’s see how the 12-team format performs in the 2025 season.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
