While we await word on whether the NCAA is going to foolishly, needlessly, heedlessly, almost predictably tinker with the best postseason in sports, the NCAA Basketball Tournament, let’s check in on a playoff that’s far from perfect and actually needs scrutiny.

It’s the one run by college football.

The latest pronouncement on the subject came from Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark. His conference kicked off July Media Days mania this week, and during his address there, he continued to lobby strongly for a future format in 2026 and beyond that’s popular among SEC football coaches.

It’s the so-called 5+11, a 16-team model that awards five automatic bids to the highest-ranked conference champions and adds 11 at-large selections chosen by the playoff committee. The ACC seems on board with that format. The Big Ten appears to favor the unbalanced, anti-competitive 4-4-2-2-1-3 model, which would reserve four bids each for the Big Ten and SEC, two each for the Big 12 and ACC and one for the Group of Five with three at-large teams.

The SEC has yet to go public with an official position. Stay tuned for Greg Sankey’s State of the Conference address Monday at Media Days in Atlanta.

Yormark took the lead in Frisco, Texas.

“We continue to believe the 5+11 model is the right playoff format,” he said. “We want to earn it on the field. We do not need a professional model. We are not the NFL. We are college football, and we must act like it.”

Put aside for the moment that, led by the likes of big-spending Big 12 member Texas Tech, college football as an enterprise now acts as a quasi-professional operation. Yormark may lead a conference that belongs to the second tier of the Power 4, but his opinion will matter when the decision-makers get around to figuring out a playoff format for the future.

Their deadline for 2026 is Dec. 1.

What Yormark didn’t say, and what we haven’t heard from fellow power conference commissioners Sankey, Tony Petitti of the Big Ten and Jim Phillips of the ACC, is a reasonable, rational explanation for a significant leap from a 12-team playoff to a 16-team event.

Money is often the answer no matter the question, and it applies here to the argument that bigger is better. But beyond the expected cash grab, wouldn’t it make more sense to let the 12-team playoff run through at least a four-year cycle to assess its advantages and disadvantages?

After one go-round, the rankings vs. seedings confusion of last year’s playoff already has been cleared up. Leave it to college football to come up with a playoff system in which Texas was ranked No. 3 but seeded No. 5 while Arizona State was ranked No. 12 but seeded No. 4.

The math didn’t add up, but the Sun Devils did put up an admirable fight before falling to the Longhorns in the quarterfinals.

This season, you will be what the final College Football Playoff committee’s final rankings say you are, for the most part. The five highest-ranked conference champions again will be guaranteed a spot – to include a Group of Six team in the field – but the seeding will match the rankings. That is unless, say, the ACC champion is ranked No. 16 on Selection Sunday, in which case that team will bump the lowest-ranked would-be at-large selection out of the field.

It’s a common-sense adjustment. No offense to Arizona State and Boise State, but they didn’t deserve a first-round bye last December. Texas and Penn State, ranked third and fourth, did.

Last season, all four teams with a first-round bye lost in the quarterfinals, but the odd seedings vs. rankings bracket skewed the matchups. Top-ranked Oregon had to play its first playoff game against dangerous sixth-ranked but eighth-seeded Ohio State in the quarterfinals. It did not go well for the Ducks, and the Buckeyes went on to win it all.

Under this year’s format, Oregon still would’ve received a first-round bye but would’ve opened against the winner of an 8 vs. 9 game between Indiana and Boise State.

Unless someone taps the brakes on the rush to jump to a 16-team playoff in 2026, the sport and its fans will have no opportunity to marinate on this season’s updated 12-team format. Just a year ago, they tripled the field from four to 12. What’s the hurry to quadruple the bracket from four to 16 in a three-year span from 2023-26? Isn’t there enough chaotic change going on in this sport at the moment?

Think about the slow and steady evolution of college football’s postseason. The BCS, essentially a two-team playoff, lasted for 16 years from 1998-2013. While the ever-changing, double-sided selection system of man and machine didn’t always get it right, the introduction of a true annual national championship game helped the sport grow tremendously.

Because undefeated Auburn didn’t get a chance to win the 2004 title and one-loss Alabama got a second chance in 2011, college football realized that two playoff teams was two too few.

So in 2014 they doubled the field, increasing the buzz and the revenue, despite all those lopsided semifinals, and the four-team playoff lived for 10 years. Selection controversy remained, which was not necessarily a bad thing, unless you were undefeated 2023 Florida State.

The initial iteration of the 12-team playoff in 2024 showed promise, but the convoluted bracket helped water down the drama. Nine of the 11 games were decided by double-digits. Hopefully, this year’s improved format will offer a positive course correction and deliver more fourth-quarter fireworks.

Since the Power 4 can’t seem to agree on an optimal 16-team format for 2026, why expand at all? Why not let the 12-team playoff breathe and grow and show whether it might not be the perfect number?

Basketball arrives at a Sweet 16 after the first week of March Madness. Football might thrive quite nicely with a Dandy Dozen at the start – unless the blowouts continue and 12 proves to be too many in terms of quality matchups and empty days between rounds.

As Yormark said, they’re already involved in a deep dive on the selection criteria “to figure out how they can modernize and contemporize and how they use data and how certain metrics can be more heavily weighted.”

It would be smart if he and the other wise men in charge took the same approach to gather enough data points to determine whether 12 is too few, too many or just right.