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Nick Saban Officially Changed Opinion On College Football Playoff

Originally posted on The Spun | By Tzvi Machlin | Last updated May 20, 2025 6:54 PM ET

Despite owning more College Football Playoff championship wins than any other coach with three, former Alabama head coach Nick Saban has never really expressed any fondness for the postseason system.

Until now.

In a recent interview at a charity golf tournament, Saban lamented how much more important the traditional bowl games used to be. He believes that maintaining the tradition of bowl games was "important to the history and tradition of college football.

But he now feels that with the expanded College Football Playoff, bowl games have taken a less significant role in football to begin with. He feels that if bowl games are already being done away with, expanding the playoff is "probably a good thing."

“Back in the (day), I was never for expanding the Playoff, because I thought bowl games were really important to the history and tradition of college football,” Saban said. “But now that we have expanded the Playoff and bowl games have taken a less significant role. So I think expanding the Playoff and having as many teams involved as we can without playing too many games for the players, that’s a little bit of concern, is probably a good thing.”

Despite more than half of the games in the 12-team College Football Playoff being blowouts, the ratings were still phenomenal. They were so good that the powers that be are already mulling a further expansion to a whopping 16 teams sometime in the increasingly-near future.

Under the current model, the five highest-ranked conference champions qualify along with the next seven at-large bids.

The new format would offer far more conference-based automatic bids.

There would be four automatic bids each for the Big Ten and SEC conferences. The Big 12 and ACC would each get two. One bid would go to the Group of Six conferences while the remaining three would go to at-large bids.

The expanded playoff format would also present options for a sort of "inner-league play-in game" for some teams in certain conferences to qualify separately from their 12-game schedule.

Suffice it to say, there's a lot of room for more football and it seems increasingly likely that the College Football Playoff will be feeding us.

This article first appeared on The Spun and was syndicated with permission.

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