College Football Playoff margin of victory: Critics bash blowouts after one-sided first round in 12-team debut

Morgan Moriarty

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College Football Playoff margin of victory: Critics bash blowouts after one-sided first round in 12-team debut image

The highly-anticipated 12-team College Football Playoff kicked off this weekend. On Friday and Saturday, the new postseason format brought four first-round games, all of which took place on-campus of the higher seed.

Although the matchups were expected to be close games, the first three — Indiana-Notre Dame, SMU-Penn State and Clemson-Texas — were all three-score games at halftime.

In the first year of the expanded 12-team playoff, there was obvious criticism about how little entertainment value the games had. But in looking a bit deeper at the playoff's four-team history overall, blowouts in the CFP are more commonplace than you may think, even before this year.

Let's take a look at College Football Playoff history to see how common blowouts were even before the expanded 12-team field.

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CFP average margin of victory

Here's how each first-round game finished up: 

  • Notre Dame 27, Indiana 17, 10-point margin of victory
  • Penn State 38, SMU 10, 28-point margin of victory
  • Texas 38, Clemson 24, 14-point margin of victory

None of the games were close on Friday and Saturday. Notre Dame led Indiana 17-3 at halftime, and took a 27-3 lead in the fourth quarter. The Hoosiers' first touchdown came in the last two minutes of the game. Penn State was up 28-0 at halftime, and Texas led 28-10 at half. 

It may seem strange to have so many of these first-round games be not very close. But history has proved that blowout games in the first round were actually pretty common. 

Before the system expanded this year, the four-team playoff system was in-place from 2014-2023. The average margin of victories for each team that prevailed in the first round? 17 points! 

The three first-round games followed that trend, with an average margin of victory of 17.3 points. Here's a closer look at some of the blowout games in the four-team playoff. Consistently every season, there seemed to be one playoff semifinal that was close, whereas the other wasn't. Take a look at some past playoff scores: 

  • 2014-15: No. 2 Oregon 59, Florida State 20 
  • 2015-16: No. 2 Alabama 38, No. 3 Michigan State 3
  • 2016-17: No. 1 Alabama 24, No. 4 Washington 7
  • 2016: 17: No. 2 Clemson 31, No. 3 Ohio State 0 
  • 2017-18: No. 4 Alabama 24, No. 1 Clemson 6
  • 2018-19: No. 2 Clemson 30, No. 3 Notre Dame 3 
  • 2019-20: No. 1 LSU 63, No. 4 Oklahoma 28
  • 2020-21: No. 1 Alabama 31, No. 4 Notre Dame 14
  • 2020-21: No. 3 Ohio State 49, No. 2 Clemson 28
  • 2021-22: No. 1 Alabama 27, No. 4 Cincinnati 6
  • 2021: 22: No. 3 Georgia 34, No. 2 Michigan 11

The outliers in which both semifinal games were one-score games came during the 2022 and 2023 seasons. Those years, we had No. 3 TCU beat No. 2 Michigan 51-45 in the Fiesta Bowl, and No. 1 Georgia beat No. 4 Ohio State 42-41 in the Peach Bowl. Just last season, No. 1 Michigan beat No. 4 Alabama 27-20 in overtime in the Rose Bowl, and No. 2 Washington beat No. 3 Texas 37-31 in the Sugar Bowl. 

We've even seen some blowouts in the national title games in the four-team playoff system. Here are some of the more notable ones: 

  • 2022-23: No. 1 Georgia 65, No. 3 TCU 7
  • 2021-22: No. 1 Alabama 52, No. 3 Ohio State 24
  • 2019-22: No. 2 Clemson 44, No. 1 Alabama 16
  • 2014-15: No. 4 Ohio State 42, No. 2 Oregon 20

COLLEGE FOOTBALL AWARDS

Blowouts in sports are nothing new. And that's especially true in college football.

Given that this is the first iteration of the 12-team playoff, it also makes the expanded system an easy target. More eyeballs on these games makes them even more ripe for criticism. 

This 12-team playoff isn't going away anytime soon. The television networks, the respective schools and the playoff itself is making too much money to go back to a smaller field. In fact, the system expanding to 16 teams as soon as 2026 is still reportedly on the table.

Games that aren't close are par for the course in every sport, and college football especially. There will be plenty of conversations about whether it was a mistake to expand the field with the blowouts. But history proves that they have been around for more than 10 years, even when the playoff was just four teams. 

MORE COLLEGE FOOTBALL NEWS:

Morgan Moriarty

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Morgan Moriarty joined The Sporting News as a content producer in the fall of 2024. Her sports journalism career started at the University of Florida in 2012, where she graduated in 2015. She has covered college football and basketball, the NFL and numerous other major sports for outlets like the Tampa Bay Times, Saturday Down South, UPROXX Sports and SB Nation. She also covers college football for Bleacher Report, and is a featured guest on various CNN programs.