With same teams over and over, is College Football Playoff already getting stale?

The fifth College Football Playoff bracket was revealed Sunday with little suspense, practically no controversy and few legitimate complaints from Georgia and Ohio State, who were snubbed for the fourth spot in favor of Oklahoma.

Though some of the sport’s tastemakers were swayed by Georgia’s strong performance in a losing effort to Alabama on Saturday, the CFP’s selection committee went by the book in rewarding a conference champion, played it safe in taking a one-loss team over a two-loss team and made the decision to reward the team that had the better season. In other words, the committee did exactly what it was designed to do.

But lost in the arguments over the last week about whether the playoff should be four or eight and the hair-splitting bout whether four best teams actually means four most deserving is a structural problem with the sport that the Playoff was designed to solve but actually has made worse.

Since the inception of the four-team format, there have now been 20 playoff spots awarded. With Notre Dame making it for the first time this year, they have now gone to a grand total of 10 different schools.

Even in a sport that has been defined by dynasties and epochs of greatness, at what point does the reliability of college football’s top programs being in the Playoff start to become a little bit stale?

For the third time in the last four years, Alabama, Oklahoma and Clemson made the Playoff in the same year. While this year’s matchups look good on paper, Las Vegas oddsmakers have installed both Clemson and Alabama as double-digit favorites, which means they will be heavily favored to meet for the fourth straight year in the Playoff on January 7 in Santa Clara, Calif.

But if the primary argument against the old BCS was that it didn’t give enough teams a fair shot to compete for a national championship, the Playoff has actually seemed to narrow the field rather than expand it.

In the final seven years of the BCS, for instance, five different schools won national championships and 10 played for it. Between 2007 and 2010, you didn’t have a single program get to the title game more than once.

The question, since we’re not going backward to the BCS system or smaller conference, is what can be changed to spice things up?

One radical idea would be to overhaul scheduling models and come up with an NFL-like formula that would add tougher opponents both in and outside the conference based on what teams did the previous year. Essentially, it would work like a golf handicap – the better you are, the tougher schedule you have to face.

But given how unlikely that is to happen, the next-best idea is playoff expansion that starts the week after the regular season with higher seeds playing at home venues and without a month off to heal the bumps and bruises.

Based upon the committee’s rankings this year, the quarterfinal matchups would have looked like this: UCF at Alabama, Michigan at Clemson, Ohio State at Notre Dame, Georgia at Oklahoma.

Only someone who hates fun would take the current slate of semifinals over the variety and spice of those matchups and storylines.

Make no mistake, the current Playoff has been an improvement for college football. But after seeing the same teams pop up year after year in the four-team format, it soon will need to offer something new.