“Should I stay or should I go?”
Punk icons The Clash gave college football fans their question long before television executives and university presidents gave them reasons to ask it.
Once, staying meant another Saturday with something familiar with your stadium and your rivals.
Players you watched grow. A conference championship worth celebrating and a bowl trip that needed no defense.
Now staying means wondering what will disappear next.
The College Football Playoff is expanding to 24 teams beginning with the 2027 season.
More access.
More games.
More television inventory.
We are supposed to hear opportunities in that announcement.
I hear a sport struggling to explain why anything outside its bracket should matter.
For this season, Penn State fans are studying projections that send the Nittany Lions to the Music City Bowl, Duke’s Mayo Bowl or First Responder Bowl. Those destinations should offer something enjoyable: another opponent, another trip, another afternoon together.
Instead, the conversation carries an apology. This is what remains after the important football ends.
We should have recognized where this was heading.
Once college football decided its entire season needed to serve one championship, everything else became vulnerable. Four teams were insufficient. Then 12. Now 24. Each expansion promises to fix dissatisfaction created partly by the previous definition of success.
The old system had flaws. Penn State knows what undefeated seasons without a national championship feel like. Nobody needs to pretend polls were fair or that arguments settled anything.
But major college football’s national championship was, for generations, mythical in ways that allowed other achievements to breathe.
For Big Ten teams, Pasadena was the destination. Winning the Rose Bowl could define a career, a team, an entire childhood of following your school.
Go to Camp Randall. Look at how Wisconsin displays its Rose Bowl history. Those accomplishments remain part of the building because they remain part of the people.
They were never consolation prizes.
Now with the expansion is the elimination of conference championship games. The brain child of SEC commissioner Roy Kramer that helped build the conference’s brand that every conference copied is now gone.
The television people who wanted a cleaner championship product underestimated that. College football’s peculiarities were central to its appeal. Geography mattered. Familiarity mattered. Different communities could finish January believing they had something worth remembering.
Now we are teaching nearly everyone to feel eliminated.
Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz captured that estrangement Tuesday.
Add Nittany Sports Now as a preferred source in Google! Click here to add us.“I’m not feeling real collegiate anymore,” he said.
“If I was, we’d still be playing with 10 or 11 teams in the Big Ten.”
That conference now requires cross-country travel while old rivalries compete for space on schedules.
The name survives. The neighborhood does not.
And the postseason is only part of the exhaustion.
NIL and greater transfer freedom gave players opportunities they deserved. Paying athletes is not what makes the sport feel hollow. Asking fans to maintain lifelong loyalty while every other relationship becomes negotiable is.
Coaches recruit their own rosters. Fans celebrate a commitment, then wonder how long it will last. A breakout player at a smaller program can become somebody else’s offseason shopping target.
The emotional investment keeps getting longer. The apparent shelf life keeps getting shorter.
Even the rhythm of Saturday feels negotiable. First downs generally no longer stop the clock outside the final two minutes of each half. A two-minute timeout arrived. Fans can reasonably wonder why making games more efficient never seems to make watching them feel less interrupted.
The ticket, the parking space and the donation all ask for more. At some point, a supporter is entitled to ask whether the experience still offers enough to justify what it now demands.
Meanwhile, the rankings remain an argument dressed as an answer.
This week, 8-1 Georgia sits above 9-0 Utah, and 7-2 Alabama sits above 9-0 UCLA. Schedule strength deserves consideration. So does the frustration of watching unbeaten teams explain themselves while recognizable powers receive the benefit of interpretation.
Expanding the field does not eliminate that distrust. It moves the argument down the rankings.
Penn State cannot simply blame distant executives, either.
President Neeli Bendapudi represents the Big Ten on the CFP Board of Managers. That board oversees the organization’s business, policies and operations. University leadership has a seat at the table shaping this future.
Fans deserve to know what those leaders believe is worth protecting besides revenue.
There are benefits to expansion. More campus playoff games will produce wonderful atmospheres. More teams will remain alive longer. Some fans will love it.
But a larger bracket cannot repair every relationship the sport has weakened.
It cannot restore a rivalry by adding a broadcast window. It cannot make a family’s trip affordable. It cannot manufacture attachment to a roster or persuade people that a bowl matters after years of treating it as irrelevant.
The Clash’s question lingers because leaving something you love is rarely simple. You remember what made you stay. You keep looking for it beneath the changes.
College football is counting on that attachment.
How much longer should it be allowed to?
