EUGENE - Dan Lanning has watched college football get turned inside out over the last 10 years, and he thinks that matters when people talk about the sport’s next playoff leap.
The Oregon coach said Monday that the game is not the same one he entered as a graduate assistant at Alabama in 2015. Conference realignment, the transfer portal and player compensation have changed how rosters are built, and in Lanning’s view, the old model of a few loaded powers separating themselves from everyone else is gone.
“Ten years ago, some of the best teams in college football had great players stacked, and there wasn’t the opportunity for those players necessarily go somewhere else,” Lanning said Monday. “Now, I think, with NIL and some of the things that happen with the portal, there’s a lot of transactions that happen each season, and guys that are good players aren’t necessarily stacked in depth behind other good players on rosters, right?
“We’re fortunate to have a really good roster here, but there’s transition every year, and I think what you see is, you see more guys that they would have been a really good two here. Now they go somewhere else, and they become a one, and then they develop, and they grow as a player, and they become really good players. I think that’s part of it is the distribution of talent is higher now than it’s ever been.”
That backdrop helped shape the latest playoff move, with a 24-team field becoming official Monday for the 2027 season. The expansion has plenty of skeptics.
Fans have not exactly embraced it, and some coaches - including Nick Saban - have pushed back against the steady growth of the postseason. Plenty of critics see the whole thing as a cash play, especially with television money only getting bigger.
Lanning, though, sees a football case for it.
He pointed to the way teams change over the course of a season and argued that the expanded format could still reward the best teams at the end, even if the path gets wider.
“We’re certainly not the same team we were when we started the season, right? We’ve experienced some adversity, we’ve seen some different players on the field, we’ve gone through some coaching transition,” Lanning said.
“But the goal is to be able to get teams that are capable of winning at the end. I think that it allows a team, like ourselves, where you can say, ‘Okay, the best team could be in there, potentially, and have a chance to go compete.’
“I mean, we saw it last year with Miami that they experienced a couple losses, and they started playing their best football, really, towards the end of the season, and end up in the national championship.”
The concern, of course, is what happens to the regular season when the bracket gets that big. Under the new setup, conference championship games go away. The five automatic bids will go to the four power conference champions and the highest-ranked Group of Six team, while the other 19 spots will be handed out by the CFP committee.
That opens the door to a messy question: could a power-conference team with an uneven season still sneak in, then get exposed right away because it never quite had the goods? Maybe.
Maybe not. Oregon and Ohio State, the team the Ducks just beat, are part of the argument that even the sport’s heavyweights can stumble now.
A team sitting in the teens or 20s in the rankings might still have enough firepower to make a real run.
That debate isn’t going away. But Lanning’s stance is clear, and with Oregon still chasing a place in this season’s final 12-team bracket, he sounds comfortable with the sport moving to 24.
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