College football may be dropping traditions left and right but one will always remain: Bill Hancock being trotted out to endorse a reconfiguration of college football he'd spent years decrying.

“This proposal at its heart was created to provide more participation for more players and more schools,” CFP executive director Bill Hancock said. “In a nutshell, that is the working group’s message: more participation.”

We may not get Texas-Texas A&M or Oklahoma-Nebraska anymore, but we'll always have the greatest rivalry: Hancock now vs Hancock five minutes ago.

Anyway, the reconfiguration in bullet points:

• 12-team field.
• The 6 highest-ranked conference champions get automatic bids.
• The 6 highest-ranked non-champions get at-large bids.
• The top four conference champions get byes.
• The first round is at home sites. Quarters, semis, and the final are at bowl sites.
• There is no re-seeding to avoid rematches or intraconference matchups.

To the takes machine!

[After THE JUMP: maybe talk to Bob Homegames next time]

Twelve is the right number. Any playoff expansion was going to come with a Group of Five bid. Expanding to eight functionally adds in the Pac-12 champ, a G5 team, the second-best SEC team, and then a single wildcard (which could easily be another SEC team). That doesn't do much to solve the problem that CFB currently has where the whole point of the season is the playoff and the vast majority of college football knows it has a 0% chance of making it in.

Sixteen, meanwhile, is too big. We have a local example of why. The final playoff rankings that year featured Michigan at #14 and Notre Dame at #15. The 2019 Michigan team is the one that lost 35-14 to Wisconsin and 56-27 to OSU. They also lost a game to PSU. Their main accomplishments were that grim 10-3 win over Iowa and a random firebombing of, yep, Notre Dame. The idea that Michigan team—which went 2-3 against ranked teams and was largely uncompetitive in two of those games—would make it in rankles. And ND would slide in right behind them.

Matt Hinton has pointed out that these sorts of analyses assume that the CFP committee rankings, meaningless past #4, are well thought-out…

Two things about retrofitting the 12-team format to past seasons: 1) 2020 was in no way a representative season for anyone, especially not for the Pac-12, and 2) Committee rankings beyond the top 4 in any given season might have been very different if they'd actually mattered

— Matt Hinton (@MattRHinton) June 10, 2021

…but it's not like there are appealing options past 15 most years that might get elevated. The 2019 options just outside a hypothetical 16 team playoff are Iowa and Minnesota.

Twelve excludes teams that had almost universally bleh seasons, aside from the occasional one-loss G5 team that doesn't have a marquee win. It also preserves some of the urgency of the regular season by dangling the carrot of a bye in front of teams.

Why is this happening? Obvious:

…here’s the bottom line: 44 programs would’ve reached the College Football Playoff at least once over a 10-year period. And that’s why they’re expanding.

“One of the things we were responding to was the concentration that’s occurred: 78.5 percent of all the opportunities in the first seven years have gone to five teams,” Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said Thursday.

Michigan's part in this is minor and rather said, but they land home games in 2016 (#6, playing Florida State) and 2018 (#7, playing #10 Florida*). At least we're not Texas, which didn't make the field once in this thought exercise.

*[You can change college football into a 30-on-30 game played only on moons of Saturn and Michigan will be handed a matchup with Florida.]

The format can get weird. This is mostly an Alabama problem, because when Alabama doesn't win the SEC they generally get dropped to the #5 slot, causing the #4 team to swear extensively at the prospect of getting the Tide at a neutral site a week after they kicked a G5 team's face in. This is most notable in 2017, when Alabama got dropped out of the SEC title game by an Iron Bowl loss. They made the CFP anyway and won the title win wins over Clemson and Georgia; in this format they get dropped to #5, facing UCF and then Ohio State.

Finally, Notre Dame gets boned. After years of skating along as a coddled independent handed exceptions, this plan would ban Notre Dame (and other independents) from byes. Jack Swarbrick is salty:

When asked about not having a bye, ND AD Jack Swarbrick said "I look forward to never hearing again about how we played one less game or don't have a conference championship."

— Heather Dinich (@CFBHeather) June 10, 2021

I plan on bringing that up constantly anyway.

What is with these guys and bowl games? This edition of the playoff has at least four too many games played at antiseptic neutral sites potentially many thousands of miles away from participants. It has a bizarre feature: teams ranked 5-8 get home playoff games. Teams ranked 1-4 do not. Fans of teams that make the championship game are looking at three different trips in short order. This is much less of a deal when you live near some of these sites, which is another advantage handed to a conference that really does not need one.

I don't know why the guys at the top of this sport keep letting third-party bowls horn in and grab some of the money so their championship can be worse. I mean, I do: this is a mid-contract reconfiguration and they have to get buy in from the people who run the New Year's Six:

As long as the playoff is operating under the current contract, it has to honor its agreements with the New Year's Six Bowls, unless everyone involved in those contracts agrees to change them.

It is possible that there is an underlying desire to have more home games but that can't happen until 2026-27, so they're going to trot out Hancock to talk about their treasured relationship with these bowls while they prepare a knife in the back.

On the other hand, maybe not:

"I'm not sure playing in East Lansing, Michigan on Jan. 7 is a really good idea." - Bob Bowlsby said, in response to a @DanWetzel question about why using the bowl. (It would probably be a good idea for Michigan State!)

— Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) June 10, 2021

That's nonsense, obviously, since the format currently allows for a northern home game one whole week before Bowlsby's horror scenario. But maybe there's still a majority in favor of the geographical slant away from the Big Ten even after the contract expires.