The 24-team College Football Playoff is on the way, and the loudest criticism of the format has never really been about the extra games. It’s about what those extra games might do to everything that comes before them.
The concern isn’t just that the regular season could lose some of its edge. It’s that the sport’s most cherished rivalry weekends could start to mean less to the people making the decisions that matter most.
A 10-1 team could roll into rivalry weekend already locked into the playoff field, which changes the math in a big way. If the postseason spot is safe, then the next question becomes simple: is it worth risking a quarterback, a star running back, or a cornerstone defender in a game that no longer changes your playoff fate?
That’s where the real damage could happen. Nobody is suggesting whole teams would suddenly sit down en masse.
The more likely shift is subtler than that - coaches getting careful with injuries, limiting snaps, and leaning toward caution when a player is already banged up. And once postseason positioning is secured, that kind of thinking can take over fast.
Georgia’s annual meeting with Georgia Tech is the clearest example of how messy this could get.
Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate has long been one of the sport’s most recognizable rivalries, a game that carries weight no matter what the records say. But under a 24-team playoff, it’s easy to picture Georgia reaching the final week with its place already set. In that scenario, the game could slide from pressure-cooker showdown to something much closer to a tune-up.
If Kirby Smart is looking at a starter with a sore shoulder or an ankle issue, the incentives change. Georgia would still want to beat Georgia Tech - no one who knows this rivalry would doubt that - but wanting to win and needing to win are not the same thing when a national title run could still require four or five more games.
Georgia Tech wouldn’t come out cleanly either. Brent Key and the Yellow Jackets would obviously take the win, but taking down a Georgia team that is more interested in staying healthy than going all-out would not carry the same punch as beating the Bulldogs at full strength.
That’s the uncomfortable part of this whole discussion. Rivalry games are supposed to be the games that matter to both sides. If one team is treating it like a job to survive and the other is treating it like the biggest day of its season, the whole thing starts to feel off.
The NFL has already shown what this looks like when playoff seeding becomes the main priority. Teams regularly rest important players once their position is settled, and that makes sense in a league where the playoffs are the only thing that really counts.
College football has always sold itself differently, though. The final weekend is not just another slate.
It’s Georgia-Georgia Tech, Alabama-Auburn, Ohio State-Michigan.
There is a possible fix, but it comes with its own price tag: move the rivalry games earlier in the season.
That would make it harder for teams to enter those matchups with their playoff spots already secured. Georgia and Georgia Tech in early October, for instance, would likely mean the Bulldogs still have plenty to play for. The same logic would apply to Alabama-Auburn, Ohio State-Michigan, and Texas-Texas A&M.
But shifting those games would also strip away part of what makes them feel like those games. The Iron Bowl belongs to Thanksgiving weekend.
Ohio State and Michigan have built their seasons around the finale. Georgia and Georgia Tech have their own late-November rhythm tied to Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate.
Move them, and maybe you preserve their competitive bite. But you also lose some of the tradition that made them special in the first place. Halloween candy instead of Thanksgiving turkey just doesn’t hit the same.
And even that change wouldn’t solve everything. An October date might keep both teams alive in the playoff race, but it still wouldn’t guarantee that a loss would feel as devastating as it once did.
That’s the tradeoff baked into playoff expansion. The College Football Playoff is trying to create more meaningful postseason football, but in the process it could reshape the regular-season traditions that made the sport so compelling in the first place.
The rivalries would remain. The feeling around them might not.
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