Let's talk about pancakes.
Not the kind that violently plants a defensive player's backside into the turf, though Pancake Chef Emeritus Orlando Pace would qualify for quality offseason banter. Those fluffy, syrupy breakfast discs we would devour every morning if we just had the time and metabolism?
Sadly, not those either. Let's talk about metaphorical pancakes. Full of flavor and calorie-free.
The First Pancake Theory states that the first pancake you try to make always sucks. Pan temperature is off. Spatula refuses to cooperate. The flip flops instead of flipping and you get a pathetic, wrinkled oval instead of a beautiful golden orb.
But the second pancake? Amazing. By the time you get to eight, you're in awe of the color and shape. That first pancake always looks like your ass. The second one looks like her ass. An abrupt and magnificent improvement, every time.
We use First Pancake to hatch simple ideas - embracing that they're going to sucks - but then improve and iterate them into excellence. Remember the Bowl Championship Series when it debuted in 1998?
The best Ohio State team of that decade missed out on a title shot because of one bad half. First pancake looked like shit. A simple idea that did not go far enough break the sport out of what was then commonly referred to as the Mythical National Champion. Hey, no longer mythical!
The BCS solved one problem and created a burgeoning riot that would last nearly two decades.
Tennessee's Peerless Price celebrates and yells to the crowd as head coach Phil Fulmer talks to reporters on the award stand Monday, Jan. 4, 1999 after winning the BCS Championship. © Michael Patrick/News Sentinel
We didn't get the second pancake until 2014 when the BCS gave way to a four-team playoff, which for both objective and favorite team reasons was a magnificent upgrade. Third pancake a decade later was amazing. All pancakes should be that good.
But the college football postseason cannot just expand forever, right? CFP size is an extremely well-traveled and popular debate in the 11W community, and it began with a lockdown barbershop we did back in 2020 discussing the perfect format.
One year later over 4,000 readers voted to say that expanding the tournament to eight teams would be perfect - which if you're an Ohio State fan is a coded way of saying The Buckeyes Should Never Be Left Out. A year after that, yup, still eight.
During that offseason, an earnest proposal in the 11W forum suggested the FBS should adopt the 24-team FCS model, which for the math-deficient is 300% more than the eight-team arrangement which was overwhelmingly winning our front page polls.
SIXTEEN teams might not be enough NOW THAT talent IS no longer concentrated to well-funded powerhouse programs.
Then prior to the 2024 season - when the current 12 pack debuted - another poll garnered another 4,000 votes once again mostly favoring eight teams for the postseason. College football's regular season was simply too sacred to diminish with a tournament large enough to let mediocre teams into it.
Once that third pancake was a reality, a hot topic showed up debating if the upcoming 12-team expanded slate was too small, too large or perfectly Goldilocks. A few months later after the Buckeyes won it all, another debate - perhaps the CFP should go to 16 teams? Should it be 16? Sure.
That's where the discourse ended in 2025 and it has continued into 2026 where we're just waiting for the announcement that s i x t e e n teams are going to make the title round, which in 1998 was limited to two. Does First Pancake Theory allow for diminishing returns?
It's worth exploring. When that glorious second pancake finally hit the griddle in 2014, there was no NIL and every bit of player compensation was either delivered through scholarships. Cost-of-Attendance stipends didn't even begin until the following August - and SEC programs had extremely SEC ways of juicing those stipends.
It all seems so quaint now that player compensation is all on the table, talent acquisition budgets are in place and every athletic department can attract coveted players through means previously only available through pay-for-play schemes so southern the loopholes were named after SEC players.
In message board parlance, you can distill the disintegration of the prior era into the current one as hey why is the SEC suddenly mid now after dominating the sport for two decades? It's because our batter's consistency started thinning out quite dramatically in 2019, five years after the playoff first expanded out of the BCS structure.
That's when California's Fair Pay to Play Act was passed, which was a gut-punch to amateurism, following by the knockout blow in 2021 with the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling for the plaintiff in Alston v. NCAA. This was just five years ago.
We're now coming off a season where the Indiana Hoosiers righteously purchased a coach, a roster and an infrastructure good enough to go 16-0 and absolutely nobody is crying foul about it. This past season was unimaginable even in a world with Fair Pay to Play and Alston vs. NCAA. It would have been impossible without them.
And if Indiana can make and win an expanded playoff, then any fear or letting in mediocre or undeserving teams is officially unwarranted. This is painful to type, but 16 teams might not be enough with talent no longer concentrated to well-funded powerhouse programs.
Winning doesn't just require bags of money, otherwise programs like Oklahoma State - which has a dead billionaire still outspending most donors wouldn't downshift like it has. And besides, every FBS program has money now without the need for paper bags, laundering through South Carolina mega-churches or the dilapidated one Cam Newton's father favored.
The bagman shadiness of the past has largely given way to the recruiting budgets of the present. In a sport where talent is peanut buttering across the country with free agency eliminating rebuilding time, winning now only has four non-negotiable requirements: University willingness, elite execution, a high-functioning operation and competent talent evaluation.
Jan 24, 2026; Bloomington, IN, USA; Indiana Hoosiers quarterback Fernando Mendoza holds the Heisman Trophy with Indiana Hoosiers head coach Curt Cignetti during the celebration and parade at Memorial Stadium. © Grace Hollars-USA TODAY Network via Imagn Images
Which means Jimmys and Joes can suit up for a lot more teams than they did previously, and those 16 and 24-team wishcasters were onto something. Two things can be true - Fox wants to break up ESPN's playoff broadcasting monopoly, and the 15th-best team isn't significantly inferior to the ones at the top of the table anymore.
That era had 5-stars backing up 5-stars across the depth chart at Alabama. It had Jameson Williams stuck on the bench at Ohio State, where Professor Hartline stockpiled a large number of his pupils for the future. It had Super Sophs winning championships in a sport that is now being dominated by grown-ass men.
This era has your favorite team accumulating tight ends for a variety of reasons, including that high-end ones that actually play cost less than 5-star receivers who can't see the field.
Rebuilding years are now a choice, and programs who choose to incubate their talent will find themselves replacing three dozen name plates on locker doors during the offseason after playing in an Opt-Out bowl game.
This means 12 is an inadequate number of CFP teams. It does not mean pancakes for everyone. It probably means 16, for quality control. And 24 if all the networks are invited to breakfast.
