How will straight seeding impact the 2025-26 college football playoff?

After a bad seeding in 2025, college football is making a tweak in 2026 before the bigger adjustments in 2027.

I spent a fair bit of time last offseason explaining how the new playoff format was going to have undue impact on the tournament. America’s War Game was early on the “hey, the 5-seed is guaranteed to get an easier draw” and I spent a long time trying to figure out how to seed the tournament in a way that was fair, made sense, and kept in mind the game’s status as primarily a television product.

It was impossible to make a bracket that was fair and sure enough, the committee aimed for political placation and narrative concerns about conference championship games over anything that actually made sense.

The committee was plainly aware of how unbalanced this proved to be and the only reason for the structure was that they agreed upon it before the Big 10 predictably poached the Pac-12 and destroyed that conference, leading to another round of realignment. So they rode it out for a year, I figured they’d go for two since a new structure was coming for 2026/27 anyways, and decided to tweak it even now to avoid another season like last year.

The solution? Straight seeding. The five top rated conference champions all get automatic admission, but the committee will seed by straight ranking rather than elevating conference champions to the top four seeds.

So how will this impact the race in 2025?