Did it hurt the sport's regular season? Do rivalries still matter? Here's what Nicole Auerbach took away from the first year of the expanded CFP.

The Athletic's Stewart Mandel is a preseason Penn State believer, placing the Nittany Lions atop his too-early top 25 for 2025. "I'm skeptical they can actually pull it off," Mandel writes, "but on paper, James Franklin's team deserves that status given how many players are returning."

The CFP will never likely surpass the NFL in the attention economy, but the march through the first 12-team Playoff has been a positive one.

Now that it’s all over and the Ohio State Buckeyes are the college football national champions, it can be definitively said: Expanding the College Football Playoff worked.

Ohio State came out on top in the national championship on Monday, outlasting a late Notre Dame comeback push to win 34-23. The game brought an end to the first edition of the expanded College Football Playoff, which features 12 teams vying for the title instead of four.

With Ohio State winning the national championship over Notre Dame on Monday night, it’s now time to focus on the 12-team playoff for next season. In today’s Tuesdays With Gorney, Rivals national recruiting director Adam Gorney takes his shot to seed the 12 teams that will fill the College Football Playoff bracket next season.

Since the start of the College Football Playoff in 2014, there have been 11 national champions. Which were the best? We ranked them all.

Jesse Temple: Ohio State has been a juggernaut during a three-game winning streak in the Playoff, embarrassing Tennessee and Oregon. Notre Dame has won 13 straight games and put together a fantastic season. But Ohio State’s balance and overall talent should emerge. … Ohio State 24, Notre Dame 14.

We grew up on a college football season that climaxed on New Year's Day. Is there a way back to that while keeping the excitement of the past month?

Making it to No. 1 in the College Football Playoff rankings means everything. What teams have made it to the top of the polls up to now?

The early betting favorite to win next year’s national championship is Ohio State. The question nobody can really answer at this time is what sort of game will the Buckeyes or anyone else return to when they kick it off again seven months from now.

When it came to the NFL Draft, there used to be this phenomenon called "bowl-game bias," when a prospect would see massive movement in his draft stock based on one game to end the season. It was pretty foolish.