This college football season? Absolute chaos. Forget the 12-team playoff itself; the entire year has been straight out of a Netflix drama. On one side, billionaire boosters are throwing cash like confetti for NIL deals. On the other, Bill Belichick is reinventing himself at UNC. Oh, and don’t forget Travis Hunter pulling off a historic Heisman win as a two-way star since Charles Woodson. Yet, even with all that noise, the loudest debate on the block is about the College Football Playoff (CFP) committee. And no organization in the United States is catching more strays and heat than the Playoff Committee. They surpassed the NCAA as the most hated committee in the country.

On December 15th, Kirk Herbstreit went on ‘Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich’ and didn’t hold back at all while addressing the depth issue with playoffs and poor handling by the playoff committee. “The committee is starting to kind of fall in line [with the NCAA]. No matter what they do, they’re a bunch of bozos,” he said. Kirk’s beef? The top teams don’t get a real advantage. “You finish top four, and you’re almost punished. The five h-le? That’s where you want to be.” The dude’s got a point. Texas is cruising, while Oregon—the Big Ten’s golden boy this year—is out here grinding like it’s a championship game every week.

Fans are big mad. Why? Because the playoff bracket feels like it was pieced together after one too many rounds of karaoke. The top four seeds—teams that earned their spots—are getting no love. And look, no disrespect to Boise State and Ashton Jeanty. They have no business being named No. 3 seed. Man, the whole playoff set is crazy. Case in point: Texas, sitting comfy at No. 5, has an easier road to the title than Dan Lanning’s undefeated Oregon after losing to the Georgia Bulldogs in the SEC championship game.

Meanwhile, you can hate Ryan Day all you want. But you can’t deny that Day has arguably the most stacked squad this season. They got slapped with the No. 8 seed after their fluke or embarrassing loss to Sherrone Moore’s 7-5 Michigan on week 14, putting them on a collision course with Oregon way too early. It’s like rewarding a straight-A student with a pop quiz while handing out gold stars to the C-average kid.

Look, it’s the first season in a new format. “I hope the conference commissioners will be willing to say, ‘Hey guys, we tried this the first year in the 12-team. Let’s maybe tweak this, tweak that,” Kirk Herbstreit said, giving some schooling about how to do their job. On the bright side, there’s always room for improvement. Right now, we are still in the chaos.

A broken playoff system in the first year: a potential fix

The playoff committee might as well hire PR at this point because the slanders ain’t stopping. The 12-team playoff was supposed to fix the system, but it’s already feeling like a duct tape job. Kirk Herbstreit’s idea? “Let’s just play the conference championship games, rank our…our…our 12—or if it goes up to 16—and then let’s just stack them up like March Madness. One, two, three, four, you know, all the way down.” In simple language. Borrow a page from March Madness and seed teams based on performance, not politics. Rank the teams after conference championships and let the chips fall where they may.

What’s wild is how this system punishes the best teams for, well, being the best. It’s like asking Usain Bolt to run an extra lap just because he’s faster than everyone else. Herbstreit’s call for reform is more than just hot takes; it’s common sense. A tweak to the format could not only make the playoffs more balanced but also keep the chaos where it belongs—on the field, not in the brackets.

It’s only Year 1 of the 12-team experiment, and there’s room to grow. But if the committee doesn’t fix this mess, it won’t just be Herbstreit pointing all his fingers at them. Fans, players, and coaches alike will be storming Twitter with pitchforks. The playoff is supposed to showcase the best of college football, not leave top teams stuck in a Hunger Games bracket.

This season has already cemented itself as legendary, with twists and turns that’d make Hollywood jealous. But the CFP committee needs to step it up. As Herbstreit put it, “Let’s just stack them up like March Madness” and let the games speak for themselves. Look, because if we’re going to crown a national champion, let’s make sure it’s a fight that every team has a fair shot at winning. No more freebies. No more traps. Just football.