IRVING, Texas — Inside the College Football Playoff meeting room, at a resort hotel in the posh community of Las Colinas, the industry’s most powerful leaders played a game: a bracket game.
Gathered around a table, the FBS commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director projected a 12-team playoff bracket by applying the 2022 rankings. Eight months away from a historic 2024 CFP selection day — the inaugural expanded playoff — the bracketing exercise commenced as a way to show executives the matchups, trends and perhaps even issues (we’ll get to that later) produced with a new format.
A couple hours later, a handful of reporters were ushered into the room to do the same, sitting in the exact chairs in which commissioners previously resided as outgoing CFP director Bill Hancock guided the room through the process.