HARTFORD - College football’s playoff ladder keeps getting longer, and that climb may be exactly why UConn’s football future feels even more urgent now.
Reports indicate the FBS is headed toward a 24-team playoff in 2027, a structure that would more closely resemble the FCS model and push the sport further down the road of expansion that has already swallowed basketball and every other postseason worth money. Once the game moved past its old poll-and-one-title-game setup in 1998, bigger brackets were always coming.
Two teams became four, then eight, then 12. Now it’s 24.
For UConn, that kind of expansion only sharpens the question of where the program belongs.
The Huskies are still the only FBS independent not named Notre Dame, which leaves them in a tricky spot if the access rules for a 24-team field are built around conference champions. In the model that’s been floated, automatic bids would go to the power four leagues, with their champions almost certainly eligible anyway, plus the highest-ranked Group of Six champion.
If the power conferences don’t produce many “bid-stealers,” then all of the G-6 champions could be in, leaving 18 berths for the power four. That still leaves UConn needing an at-large path, and that looks close to impossible unless the Huskies are 12-0 against a strong schedule.
That’s the reality David Benedict is staring at.
“Last year, I thought it was the most balanced and best games throughout the (12-team) playoff,” UConn AD David Benedict said. “I don’t think anyone can really predict this yet, but part of what’s happening with NIL and rev-share is talent is spreading out.
So before, where there was just a handful of schools that were dominating, until you got to that final game they weren’t competitive. This past weekend, the No.1 team got upset, the No. 2 team got upset, you’re just seeing the talent is being spread out.”
UConn has benefited from those shifts in player movement and compensation, and the program has climbed out of the abyss in ways few would have expected back in 2021. But the playoff talk changes the frame entirely. The Huskies can’t simply survive in football’s gray area forever.
In Benedict’s view, the next realignment shuffle matters. UConn has been linked in rumblings to the Pac 12 or the American Athletic Conference, though nothing has happened. If the school is going to have a realistic path to the postseason under a 24-team setup, it likely needs a better home base than the one it has now, whether that means a power conference or, at minimum, a Group of Six league.
“Until we know all the details, I can’t answer with specificity,” Benedict said. “If you have to be a champion of a conference, that matters.
I don’t know if conferences are going to keep playing championships, based on the weeks. Scheduling is going to be really important so that if you’re good you have a strength of schedule where you could be ranked.
There’s lots of change going on with regard to scheduling, especially at the P-4 level, we’ve lost (scheduled) games, multiple games in the last couple of years, so that’s more relevant, we we sit here. When we find out what the rules of the road are for getting into the playoffs, we’ll know more about scheduling.”
That uncertainty makes the present more important, not less. The Huskies are 3-3 and face UMass, 4-3, at Rentschler Field on Friday night. UConn needs that game if it wants any shot at a third straight bowl appearance.
Benedict also pointed to the school’s broader appeal in an open letter to “UConn Nation” on Monday, highlighting the program’s “brand strength,” which Nielsen Media ranked No. 1 and which is fueled by the men’s and women’s basketball programs and their recent March Madness runs. But brand only goes so far. The football team still has to win, avoid the ugly losses, and keep building in attendance, atmosphere and fundraising.
“We want to continue to move onward and upward,” coach Jason Candle said. “That’s been the goal since the day I got here, and was probably the goal before I got here.
We want to take our program as high as it can possibly go. What does that look like?
Define that for me? I don’t know if I have a definition for you, exactly what that looks like.”
For Candle, as it was for Jim Mora before him, the focus stays on the next game. But the broader picture is becoming impossible to ignore. Bowl eligibility may soon feel like the floor, not the goal, and the path to anything bigger depends on UConn finding a permanent place to dock.
“You see for a lot of football teams and players, if they don’t get in that top 12, they shut it down,” Benedict said. “I don’t think that’s necessarily healthy, so by expanding it, you have six more games, 12 more really good football teams that would’ve been previously been playing in a good bowl game.
We’ve created this playoff, it would be like the NCAA Tournament and the NIT, most teams want to be in the NCAA. I think expanding it is the right direction.
I can’t sit here today and connect dots and say it will (help UConn), and I don’t even know if they’ve 100-percent finalized how access is going to work, but what they’re saying the top 24 ranked teams are going to get in, that’s 12 more teams and we’re going to continue to try to raise the level of our football program.”
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