College football has never been better. So why are its leaders dead-set on a 24-team playoff that could ruin the sport?
· Yahoo Sports
Dear conference commissioners, university presidents and athletic directors,
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This is an open letter to all of you. It is also a final plea as you speed run toward a 24-team playoff that now seems like an inevitability.
Just pause for a moment. Take a deep breath and think carefully about where college football is right now.
Put the Capitol Hill drama over the Protect College Sports Act to the side. Forget about your increasing budget pressures and annoyance with the transfer portal. Don't worry about court cases and TROs.
We are already 25 percent of the way through the college football regular season, so this is a good time to take stock of the product on the field. And the only reasonable conclusion is that the structure of the 12-team playoff has not only preserved the importance of the best regular season in sports, it's made it even more glorious.
At this point in the year, only a handful of teams in the power conferences are eliminated from the College Football Playoff discussion. A couple dozen others are going to face make-or-break games in the next few weeks.
Just look at some of the games this weekend that have been imbued with intrigue because of the 12-team playoff:
Northwestern at Indiana: Yes, if Northwestern wins, we will have to start talking about the Wildcats as CFP contenders.
Texas at Tennessee: The Longhorns earned some margin for error with the Ohio State win, but starting 0-1 in the SEC could set the stage for a repeat of last year's snub.
Oklahoma at Georgia: It's pretty much curtains for the Sooners if they lose this one.
Ole Miss at Florida: Surprisingly, the 3-0 Gators are favored. If they can beat Ole Miss, it will get really interesting for first-year coach Jon Sumrall.
Iowa at Michigan: In a four-team playoff world, we wouldn't care because neither would really be relevant. In a 24-team playoff world, we also wouldn't care because they'd both probably get in. But with only 12 spots, we have to kind of care.
Nebraska at Michigan State: Yes, we have to pay attention to Nebraska again — at least until it shows us otherwise.
Oklahoma State at West Virginia: A sneaky huge game! The Mountaineers might be for real.
Texas A&M at LSU: It'll be getting late early for the loser.
Oregon at USC: If Oregon loses, it'll be the biggest flop in college football and Lincoln Riley might finally be on his way to a CFP appearance with the Trojans.
And again, that's not even all the games that will force us to reassess the playoff picture sometime on Saturday night or Sunday morning. Like, you could even check in on Virginia Tech at Boston College and imagine a world where the Hokies do something interesting in the ACC.
Why does this matter?
Because back when the CFP was four teams, we knew that only teams with zero or one losses realistically had a shot to make it. That meant for the most part we only needed to pay attention to the 10 or 12 teams we knew at the beginning of the season had a chance to be in the race at the end.
The obvious concern with a 24-team playoff is that there will be so many spots available — particularly for the SEC and Big Ten — that there's no intrigue week to week. That amazing Texas win over Ohio State in Week 2? Simply a low-stakes warm-up game for both teams. The spectacle in Oxford, Mississippi, last weekend? A big deal for Lane Kiffin to lose to Ole Miss, but not a terribly consequential result for either the Rebels or LSU because they'd both be in the playoff with plenty of room to spare.
In fact, why would we even think much about the playoff or put too much emphasis on any individual result until at least the first week of November? When a Big Ten or SEC team can get in easily with three losses and might even squeak in with four, the probabilities are too abstract and complicated from week to week to even talk about.
Are you sure, just three years into the 12-team CFP, that you want to make such a dramatic change to something that has worked incredibly well and juiced regular season TV ratings?
Everyone acknowledges the various pressure points that are pushing toward a 24-team playoff.
The current postseason format has decimated bowl games because players on 7-5 teams no longer want to stick around in December for their trip to Shreveport. Coaches and athletic directors are feeling the heat when they don't get in and believe expanded access will increase their job security. Television partners, FOX in particular, want a piece of the action now after failing to launch a successful bid for rights to the 12-team playoff. And, of course, there will be another pot of money available to add a couple million here or there to schools' coffers at a time when their budgets are stressed by revenue sharing.
All of this has created inertia that feels insurmountable. The 24-team playoff is almost certainly going to happen unless someone stops it. Even SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who has been the key holdout in the negotiations, is feeling the heat within his own league to relent since going to a nine-game conference schedule. (SEC coaches, in particular, are furious about this because it makes their schedules more difficult without more playoff access as a tradeoff. And the SEC making this move before securing the 16-team format it wanted has put Sankey in a surprisingly vulnerable spot.)
But why mess with it at all when TV ratings are great, stadiums are full and the race for the final playoff spots in the 12-team format still generate interest and controversy all the way until the season's final weekend?
It certainly stunk for Notre Dame last year that it got edged out by Miami for the final CFP spot because the Irish certainly seemed good enough to compete for the whole thing. But in a way, it validated the importance of the regular season because the main difference between those two teams was — wait for it — Miami's head-to-head win over the Irish.
Just as it should be.
Of all the things that need to be fixed in college sports, the CFP is probably the last thing on the list. And the downsides are potentially significant.
If the net effect of a 24-team playoff is that the regular season is worse and the playoff is worse because half the teams can't really compete, you have not served college football very well.
Please consider that before making this decision.
College football is on fire at the moment; its popularity is trumped only by the NFL. It is not without problems, but the NIL world has created a new level of parity where historically bad programs like Indiana can win national titles. Fans are emotionally and financially invested. Big games are doing huge numbers on TV (10.9 million viewers for LSU-Ole Miss, neither of which are huge national brands) and the 12-team CFP is keeping just the right amount of teams in the mix that fans can keep up with it all throughout October and November.
Do you really want to shake things up right now, when the product on the field is so compelling?
Expanding the playoff is a risk — a risk that college football fans generally don't want and administrators don't need to take.
Think carefully about how good things are before crossing that threshold. Because once you toss a well-functioning, 12-team playoff format to the side for some 24-team slop, the sport will fundamentally change and there's no going back.