Dan Mullen walked up to a microphone this week and said the quiet part out loud: the College Football Playoff is about to double in size and the Group of Six gets nothing extra for it. He's right. Then he undersold his own case so badly that the people who built this rigged bracket should be sending him a thank-you card.
The CFP is going from 12 teams to 24. The field will be the Power Four champions, the single highest-ranked Group of Six team, and 19 at-large bids. Nothing actually changes for the little guy: when the Playoff was 12 teams, the G6 got exactly one guaranteed spot. Now that it's 24, the G6 still gets exactly one. Twice the party, same one ticket at the door.
Mullen, now in his second season running UNLV, laid out the grievance plainly. "At our level, the Group of Six at 12, we got one in. I think we should have two in. So, they doubled the number of teams. I don't know why we didn't get a second bid. If they're gonna do 24, we should have got a second bid." That's a coach doing arithmetic the sport's power brokers are pretending not to understand.
His fix is where it falls apart. Mullen wants the four top-ranked G6 conference champions to play each other on a dedicated weekend, ideally wrapped around Army-Navy, with the two winners claiming a pair of auto bids. "I think it could be great," he said. It would make for a fun television weekend. It solves almost nothing.
Four mid-major champions scrapping for two spots instead of five scrapping for one still leaves a conference champion sitting at home before a single playoff snap gets played. And the four who do get in have to survive an extra elimination game no Power Four champion is ever asked to play. A 10-2 league champ earns a seat automatically if it plays in the right conference, and earns a cage match if it doesn't. It's just a slightly larger hoop to jump through.
Why not just guarantee an automatic bid to every Group of Six conference champion? There are five of them: American, Mountain West, Conference USA, MAC and Sun Belt. Five auto bids in a 24-team field is a small ask. The Power Four get their champions in by rule and then help themselves to a stack of at-large bids on top. Winning your league should mean winning your league, the way it does in nearly every other sport that bothers to crown a champion and then lets them play for the title.
More auto bids means more blowouts and more worn-down bodies in a season that already runs too long. Fine. But a 24-team bracket stuffed with at-large teams from the same four leagues will produce plenty of its own lopsided December afternoons, and nobody designing this format seems to lose sleep over quality when the beneficiary is a seventh-place Power Four team. The strain argument only ever gets wheeled out when the team on the wrong end of it is from Boise or Appalachian State. The current snapshot has Boise State sitting in that lone G6 slot, and even that could change before the season ends. One seat, for five leagues, in a 24-team bracket.
The CFP Management Committee and the Power Four commissioners wrote the 24-team format, and this sits on them. They had a blank sheet of paper and a mandate to expand access, and they used it to protect their own conferences' bid counts while handing the entire Group of Six the same single consolation ticket it already had. That's a choice they made on purpose.
Mullen's the coach willing to stand up and say the G6 got robbed while everyone else nods along to the press release about inclusion. But he's negotiating against himself. You don't counter a lowball offer by lowballing yourself. The G6 champions don't need a theme-park play-in on Army-Navy weekend to prove they belong. They won their leagues. Put all five in the field and stop making them audition for a seat the Power Four handed itself for free.
