We still have a few days left in the college football offseason, so I guess there’s still time to get in offseason talk. The topic that’s been dominating the entire offseason has been what to do to fix the College Football Playoff, and it’s weird that we’ve settled on this because… the first edition of the 12-team playoff… worked pretty well?
Purists, of course, will be annoyed that the first 12-team playoff produced a champion that lost two games and finished fourth in its conference. That would
be a valid point if the proposals being floated were ones to ensure that would never happen again, but instead, things are moving entirely in the opposite direction: expansion, and the even dumber idea of guaranteed automatic bids for teams that didn’t even win their conference.
The initial change was to do away with the first-round byes for the top four conference champions, which happened entirely because two of those went to Arizona State and Boise State last season. No, shut up, your point is invalid. The SEC and Big Ten decided that we have to protect the integrity of the seeding, a very silly argument considering that the NFL is perfectly content to have a 9-8 team host a 14-3 team in the first round of the playoffs because the former won its division. Sure, your arguments about the relative strength of the ACC and Big 12 might carry weight in a world where the AFC South didn’t exist, but the AFC South does exist and its winner gets a first-round home game. But, whatever, that’s not a fight worth having when pretty much everyone whose opinion counts thinks that the playoff needs to have 16 teams and the people running the Big Ten think that it should have even more than that, but in the stupidest way possible.
Somehow, the plan the SEC settled on — a 16-team playoff with automatic bids for the five highest-ranked conference champions — seems like the best one in spite of the fact that it ignores the existence of half the conferences in FBS and needlessly expands by four teams, and I’m sure it’s just a complete coincidence that three of the four extra bids in a 2024 playoff would have gone to SEC teams. At least that model preserves some form of merit to the selection process, both by rewarding (some) conference champions and allowing the flexibility to include the best teams regardless of conference affiliation.
And then you see what the Big Ten has vomited out. The Big Ten first proposed a 16-team playoff but with four automatic bids each for the SEC and Big Ten, two apiece for the ACC and Big 12, one total for the entire G5, and three at-large bids. Greg Sankey for some fucking reason pitched this at the SEC spring meetings and quickly ran into resistance from the league’s coaches (who basically just responded with “why the hell would we cap the number of bids we can get at six in years where Notre Dame is a functional program?”) and fans (who were very mad that he was explicitly arguing that the Big Ten is the SEC’s equal, a viewpoint shared by SEC athletic directors and exactly zero fans of SEC schools.) The Big Ten tried to defend this by coming out and arguing that it was necessary to force the SEC to schedule a ninth conference game (why?!) and, without saying it, to cap the number of bids the SEC can get (because, of course, we just had a basketball tournament that 14 of the SEC’s 16 members qualified for while middling Big Ten teams were saying no thanks to the fake NIT that Fox set up.)
Since that got laughed at by college football fans everywhere, the next proposal is expanding to 28 teams… but with seven automatic bids each for the Big Ten and SEC, and five each for the ACC and Big 12.
Now, I’m not fundamentally opposed to having a big playoff. But the only reason to have a playoff bigger than 16 teams is out of a need to accommodate the CUSA champ getting an automatic bid. In another vein, getting rid of automatic bids to the basketball tournament for the bottom half of Division I isn’t completely unreasonable, but you probably don’t need to have a tournament bigger than 32 if you’re doing that. You have a big tournament because you need a spot for the OVC champ, not because you need a spot for the 12th-place ACC team.
But a quick look at the Big Ten’s 2024 standings should tell you exactly how stupid this is. Seventh place in the Big Ten in 2024 was a tie between Michigan and Minnesota. Both went 7-5 in the regular season, with an out-of-conference loss: Michigan got blasted by Texas at home, and Minnesota lost at home to a North Carolina team that would go 6-6 and fire its coach. The Big Ten is explicitly arguing that those should have been playoff teams. Somehow they’ve managed to make their own allotment seem more ridiculous than either the Big 12 (which would have gotten one of Baylor/TCU/Texas Tech) or ACC (two of Syracuse/Duke/Louisville/Georgia Tech.) Left out under their proposal: Memphis, which went 10-2 and finished 25th in the final CFP ranking. So, a 28-team playoff wouldn’t have even included the entire CFP Top 25.
In the meantime, it’s strange that we got a 12-team playoff that worked pretty much perfectly in its first year — some of the first-round games were noncompetitive, though it’s hard to argue that expansion would make that better, and any purist arguments about two-loss teams getting in definitely won’t be solved by expansion — and immediately decided that that didn’t work. Or, at least, the people who run the sport did.
Meanwhile, Rob Manfred is proposing to realign MLB for no particular reason and LIV Golf still exists.
