On the July 15 edition of Yahoo Sports’ “College Football Enquirer” podcast, co-host Dan Wetzel opined that nine SEC teams had at least a chance to make the newly expanded 12-team College Football Playoff in 2024.

After Wetzel listed Georgia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, LSU, Missouri, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Texas A&M as Southeastern Conference teams entering the upcoming season with varying degrees of realistic playoff aspirations, SI.com co-host Pat Forde interrupted him to propose adding a 10th SEC team to the list.

“I’ll give you one more with at least a chance for a puncher (to make the playoffs) if a lot of things go right,” Forde said, “and that’s Kentucky.”

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Louisville’s Forde noted that UK has a large number of starters returning on both offense and defense. The club will play its first four games of the season, including its first two conference games, in Lexington. The UK player also acquired a promising, if inexperienced, quarterback from Georgia in Brock Vandagriff.

“If (Vandagriff) turns out to be really good, that could be the key component,” Forde said.

That Kentucky — which finished just 11th in the undivided SEC with 16 teams in the league’s preseason media poll — was mentioned by a prominent college football media outlet in connection with CFP participation illustrates how the expanded playoffs will change things for the better for fans of teams with football profiles similar to UK’s.

With the CFP expanding from four to 12 teams over the next two seasons and likely expanding to 14 teams starting in 2026, a new world is dawning for fans of college football programs outside the sport’s traditional elite.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that Kentucky will ever make a 12- or 14-team playoff. But the prospects of UK earning a spot in the expanded playoff far outweigh the nearly nonexistent chance the Wildcats had of ever making the four-team bracket.

In the big picture, the problem with the four-team playoffs, which began in 2014 and ended last season, was that the lack of parity in college football made the system a massively redundant system.

In the 10 seasons of the four-team play-offs, there were 40 spots available for participants.

Of those 40 spots, six teams — Alabama (eight playoff trips), Clemson (six), Ohio State (five), Oklahoma (four), Georgia (three) and Michigan (three) — filled 29.

If we add Washington and Notre Dame (each in the playoffs twice), eight teams account for 33 of the 40 total playoff appearances.

During the entire 10-year period in which the four-team play-offs were held, only 15 teams played once.

If we exclude the league’s newcomers Oklahoma and Texas (one), even the mighty SEC has only three teams that make the cut: Alabama, Georgia and LSU (one).

If we keep it that way, then at least a play-off with twelve teams participating, and in two years probably even fourteen, gives more fans and more players the opportunity to participate in meaningful play-off matches.

For all these reasons, it would be optimal if the CFP eventually grew to 16 teams.

(Yes, my enthusiasm for expanding the college football playoffs is about as great as my opposition to expanding the NCAA basketball tournament.)

These positions are not in conflict with each other.

The 68-team NCAA basketball tournament already has too many teams coming off mediocre seasons in the top conferences.

By clearing the way for more such teams to make the tournament, the value of the regular basketball season would further diminish and the achievement of a berth in the NCAA Tournament would be diminished. That’s a goal that will require significant effort to achieve.

Conversely, the four-team football pool has been too exclusive. While there may not be enough true “excellence” to fill the expanded CFP pool, there will be more than enough “very good” almost every year to justify a larger pool.

As demonstrated in the College Football Enquirer podcast’s preseason discussion of the SEC and its 2024 playoff aspirants, an expanded playoff would allow many more programs – and many more fans – to enter seasons with at least semi-realistic aspirations of competing for playoff spots.

The expanded play-offs ensure that many more teams, and their fans, can look forward to a realistic season with ambitions for the national championship.

All of this should give college football and its affiliated groups a new boost.

If there had been a 12-team playoff game in the 21st century, I don’t think Kentucky would have made the field.

However, the top three British teams of the current century — 2007, 2018 and 2021 — would all have made it through the second half of their fixtures alive in the play-off battle.

Imagine how wonderful that must have been for the Big Blue Nation.

The thought that Kentucky might have even a “slim chance” of making the expanded 12-team playoffs this year is giving British football fans reason to at least allow themselves to dream a little.