False Start - College Football Podcast · John Buhler and Cody Williams

Episode 237: College Football Playoff thoughts, Transfer portal preview, What is going on with Michigan's coaching search?

December 22, 2025·1 hr 16 min·4 clips

John Buehler and Cody Williams open with a Bad Santa mood. They frame it as a pre-Christmas Christmas episode and immediately start trading jokes about the movie's grime, profanity, and ridiculousness. The conversation then turns to the end of the first round of the College Football Playoff. They talk through what the bracket showed and why one weekend should not send everyone into a panic spiral. Their point is simple: weird years happen, and the sport has always moved in swings. The quarterfinals get a look too, with the New Year's Eve and New Year's Day stretch treated as the next real checkpoint. From there, the show wanders into the transfer portal, where roster chaos is always ready to wreck someone's neat little plan. Michigan gets its own stretch of disbelief, which feels fair enough. The hosts do not pretend whatever Michigan is doing is tidy or fully legible. They mostly treat it like another piece of the season's ongoing nonsense. The bigger playoff argument stays centered on not overreacting to a single snapshot. Group of Five access gets defended rather than treated like a bug to patch out. They push back on the idea that the format should change just because the bracket is inconvenient for someone. The Power Four are part of that same argument, with the hosts calling out entitlement when bigger conferences start acting like the sport should be built around their preferences. Notre Dame comes up in the same broader debate about exceptions and fairness. The movie talk stays threaded through the football talk, which keeps the whole thing from hardening into a lecture. It sounds like two college football obsessives talking fast and refusing to let a boring tangent survive for long. The result is messy, funny, and built for people who enjoy the sport's arguments as much as the sport itself.

As heard by us

A holiday episode that pairs Bad Santa jokes with a blunt argument about the playoff, the portal, and Michigan.

False Start mixes a Bad Santa holiday angle with familiar college football arguments about the playoff, the transfer portal, and Michigan. John Buehler and Cody Williams keep things loose and profane, and the episode's main stance is plain: one odd playoff year is not enough…

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Why you'd press play

Play this for first-round playoff reaction, transfer-portal chatter, and a pre-Christmas Bad Santa detour.

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