Mario Cristobal doesn't want an expanded CFP bracket, but it's the best thing for Miami

Mario Cristobal has been vocally against the CFP expanding to 24 teams, but he's going to have to suck it up.

The Miami Hurricanes coach wants the playoffs to stay at 12 teams, but he's sitting on a lonely island without the rest of his ACC peers and the conference commissioner, Jim Phillips. Up until this past week, only SEC commissioner Greg Sankey had been the only hold out, but even he is beginning to concede that this is happening.

Cristobal is probably in the same boat, and recent history should tell us this won't necessarily be a bad thing for the Hurricanes. 

"It's not a beauty pageant, ok? It's not a beauty contest. It's competition. Go win. Go win on the field. The guys that deserve it get in and figure it out from there," Cristobal added in that clip from May.

Mario Cristobal will have to deal with the likelihood of a 24-team playoff

Cristobal will probably never come around on the idea of a 24-team playoff. He can be stubborn at times and, in this case, it's not that he's wrong, but this is where we're headed and over the past two years, Cristobal has had to participate in unnecessary drama.

In 2024, Miami won 10 games and didn't get in. The Hurricanes had a loss to Syracuse in the regular-season finale that knocked them from the ACC championship game and the playoffs. I think there was a legitimate argument that MIami, which had a Heisman finalist at quarterback, was as good as SMU and Clemson and just as deserving. 

The Hurricanes spent 10 weeks in the top-10 and lost out on an at-large spot, in part because Clemson beat SMU to sneak into the bracket while the Mustangs got the at-large. But even had SMU won, Miami wouldn't have gotten in because a 9-3 Alabama team was ranked higher despite losing to Vanderbilt and getting crushed by a .500 Oklahoma team. Imagine if that scenario actually happened? 

And let's even talk about last year. Cristobal had to hit the circuit to still defend Miami as being a better team than Notre Dame because, all of a sudden, some people were questioning if the fact that the Hurricanes actually won the head-to-head should matter. And the truth is, both teams were better than Alabama last year! 

In Cristobal's world, the determination of who makes the playoffs is a fair process, but in reality it isn't. It's a bunch of people in a room that are basically discussing who else should attend the SEC/Big 10 dance party. Notre Dame's AD Pete Bevacqua, who might have acted like a baby last year in the fallout from the CFP bracket announcement, did have a point about how ridiculous the selection process was, and he was right to fight for the Irish having more definitive parameters for CFP inclusion, so they know what they have to do to get in.

Miami doesn't have that protection yet and it should. The Hurricanes still have next to no margin of error this season because the schedule is perceived to be soft. If they lose any game outside of Notre Dame, being excluded from the CFP is very much on the table. 

The CFP committee constantly moves the goal posts with their selections. Sometimes it's the best team, other times it's the most deserving and, God forbid, a playoff team suffers a major injury that the committee can hold against them. Playoff expansion gives this group a little more flexibility in getting the best teams, the most deserving teams and maybe a few other fun teams. It also gives Miami the benefit of the doubt it has yet to receive from the committee, one that other pograms that have accomplished less over the past two seasons have received.

Hopefully, Cristobal will be willing to get on board with that. 

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