How exactly does a 24-team playoff help the Group of 6?

Twenty-four hours into the 24-team College Football Playoff and the champagne is already flat. The $1.7 billion deal. The campus-site games. The bracket that finally makes college football feel like March. Everyone is celebrating.

Except the 70 programs that just watched their share of the postseason get cut in half and were told it was a promotion.

The G6 had one guaranteed bid in a 12-team field — 8.3 percent of the bracket. The G6 has one guaranteed bid in a 24-team field — 4.2 percent. The field doubled. The G6's slice of it shrank. Someone with a straight face is going to have to explain to me how that constitutes improvement.

From where I'm sitting, the expansion didn't open a door. It widened a room the G6 was already barely standing in and filled it with more people who don't want them there.

You went from 1/12 of the playoff to 1/24 of the pie. You went from having scheduling access to Power 4 teams and the paydays that come with them to legislatively losing access to most of those opportunities. You went from getting $1 million to $2 million or more for those games to a market flooded with G6 programs chasing fewer slots — which is going to drive the price down. I hope the extra playoff revenue results in more money, because I don't see how any of this has added opportunity.

The real cost here isn't money. It's access — the ability to prove you belong.

Before the expansion, P4 teams played eight- or nine-game conference schedules. That left three or four non-conference slots to fill — some with P4 rivals from other conferences, some with FCS opponents and some with G6 teams, increasingly as buy games rather than the rare home-and-home series. The 24-team format requires P4 teams to play 10 games against P4 opponents. That instantly cuts the non-conference inventory available to G6 programs by a third to a half. The slots that funded those $1 million to $2 million game guarantees and produced the only résumé data the committee pretends to respect — gone, by rule.

That is a chess move. It further separates the P4 from the G6 while protecting the P4 from antitrust exposure by maintaining the fiction of at-large access. You can still get in, technically. You just can't schedule the games that would help prove you deserve to be there.

G6 programs have always needed non-conference games against P4 opponents to build the kind of résumé a selection committee will respect. Those games were the audition. Without them on the schedule, there is no case to make. You're asking a committee to evaluate you based on wins over teams it doesn't watch and has never valued.

What this expansion does is keep separation — and make it structural. It makes the G6 permanently dependent on the Power 4 rather than giving them the opportunity to earn a place alongside them. Dependent on their willingness to schedule you. Dependent on their committee to evaluate you. Dependent on their generosity to let you in.

Dependent upon them to give you a fair shake, something they'll never do unless forced to by the courts. They want your pauper self to have to come begging, just so their bottom feeders — most of the Power 4 riding coattails of association they have never earned of their own merit, either — can look down on you when they toss you a quarter.

Conference championship games were the other proof point — a possible ranked opponent, a neutral site, national television. The one stage the G6 controlled where a program could demonstrate it deserved to be in the conversation. Those are gone for the Power 4. They might be gone for the G6 too — because the new deal changed the auto-bid language from "highest-ranked conference champion" to "highest ranked Group of Six team." That means a G6 conference that keeps its championship game is rolling the dice. If your best team loses that game, it could fall in the rankings and lose the CFP bid to a team from another conference that didn't have to play one more game. The championship game becomes a liability — one extra loss the Power 4 no longer has to risk. So now you can't schedule the P4 games that build your résumé, and the championship game that used to validate it might knock you out of the bracket. How exactly do you prove your worthiness?

Oh, and what about the revenue from that championship game?

We pulled future non-conference schedules for every team in the American Athletic Conference and three G6 programs in Alabama to see how many P4 games are actually booked from 2027 forward. UAB has zero. Not one. The only team in the American with an empty P4 pipeline. Memphis has three — at Arkansas twice and at Mississippi State, all road. UTSA has three. Navy has two. Tulsa has 10 and Temple has eight, but the league average is 4.9 per team — and the distance between the top and bottom of that list is a canyon.

Outside the American, Jacksonville State has three P4 games booked, Troy has five and South Alabama has three. This is a sample across 17 programs, not a comprehensive audit. The pattern will hold across all six conferences. And every one of those games was booked under the old scheduling rules — when P4 teams had three or four non-conference slots to fill. Now that they need 10 P4 games, athletic directors across the country are about to get real busy redoing schedules they thought were long set. The G6 games are the first ones off the board.

The money matters too. Those P4 road games pay $1 million to $2 million in game guarantees — meaningful revenue for programs running on budgets of $20 million to $40 million. With fewer games available and more G6 programs chasing them, that guarantee money gets driven down. But the money was always secondary to what those games represented: the chance to compete against the programs the committee respects and prove you earned the right to be in the bracket. That's what's disappearing. The paycheck and the proof.

Every evolution of the college football postseason runs the same play. The outsiders prove they can compete under whatever rules exist. They exceed them. Then the rules change to knock them back to the start line. Maybe throw them a little more sugar to make it go down.

Right on cue, Dennis Dodd reports that sources project a separate G6 playoff would be worth approximately $200 million annually — roughly $3 million per school. The reporting is solid. The question is who benefits from floating that number at the exact moment the G6 should be fighting for a bigger seat at a $1.7 billion table it already paid to sit at. Three million dollars sounds attractive when your budget is $21 million. It sounds like surrender when you realize accepting it means walking away from the room where the real money lives.

My answer is not just no but heck no to a separate G6 playoff that does not include an automatic bid and legitimate at-large opportunities for the College Football Playoff. That is a non-starter — one that should be fought as fiercely as a cornered cat in the dog pound. Scratch their eyes out all the way to the Supreme Court if you have to. Any conference commissioner not up for that fight should resign.

But the upheaval also creates an opportunity the G6 has never had — a reason to stop playing by rules that were never written for them and start building something of their own. Schedules are about to be blown up anyway. Why not use the disruption to create preseason destination games between top G6 programs? Games fans can attend when they're excited, before anyone has lost yet, in locations that matter. Bowl games are wonderful, but it is hard to imagine them thriving around an expanded playoff with the transfer portal hollowing rosters in the background. A G6 postseason for teams not making the CFP — structured, branded, meaningful — seems far more valuable than random bowl games on a Tuesday in December.

The Diehard League was one idea. There are many structures that could operate similarly. The status quo is not going to work anymore. This has to become a battle on two fronts. First — claw for every inch of CFP access. Organize your fans. Pressure their sponsors. Do not let them shuttle you off or downplay you. No way in hell does the G6 accept relegation. And second — take care of yourselves beyond that. Reimagine what this level of football looks like when you stop waiting for the Power 4 to give you permission to matter.

Troy head coach Gerad Parker said it Monday: "If the Group of 6 football teams are a part of this deal, if we're going to be a part of a university and athletic programs that are doing our part to contribute to the House case and the funds that needed to be put in to pay for that, there better be a way in."

There better be. And if they won't open the door, the G6 had better be building its own house on the other side of the street — not as a consolation prize but as leverage. The expansion handed them a bigger bracket with a smaller share, a scheduling pipeline about to collapse and an at-large mirage built on games they cannot book against teams that no longer want to play them.

A fleeting sugar fix to a systemic nutritional problem.

Tim Stephens is the founder and CEO of Diehard Sports Network and the former sports editor of the Birmingham Post-Herald. He has covered the business and politics of college athletics for more than 25 years.