There is a new proposal out for an expanded College Football Playoff format. There are a lot of bureaucratic steps to go before it becomes anything official, as a working group must present it to another working group which will kick it up to the board of managers which will then finalize the final proposal for approval. Got all that? Good.
I have long been in favor of keeping the Playoff at four. I don’t want a situation like what happens in other sports where some marginal postseason participant catches breaks and/or fire to take home the crown. There’s room for some sports to have that kind of drama, especially in college basketball with its expansive tournament fields, but they don’t all need to have that factor.
I would like at least one sport to have its champions consistently have a realistic claim to being the best team by some metric. The 2007 New York Giants never had a shot at that. Nor did the 2013-14 UConn men’s basketball team. Basically every college football national champion I can think of in my lifetime could qualify on at least one of the best or most deserving rubric the sport popularly uses within their given seasons.
So I don’t love expanding the field to 12. I will get used to it, of course, but I will be watching out for whether every champ it produces can make that kind of claim.
The reason college football isn’t sticking with four is also the reason they’re going all the way to 12 instead of stopping at eight: they want to specifically reward teams for winning conference championships.
I’ve never been particularly concerned about that in regards to national champions. The Alabama teams that took home crystal footballs without so much as winning an outright SEC West title had real claims to being the best team. Division and conference titles are often won and lost based on the outcome of a single game, and almost anything can happen in a single game.
That’s why I want a small field. Almost anything could happen in one game. It feels less like that’s the case now because Bama, Clemson, Georgia, and Ohio State have pulled so far ahead of everyone else in talent acquisition that the teams and the very top really are less likely to fall in titanic upsets. Even so, that state won’t last forever. We really could have an undeserving team pull off a playoff upset or two and sit on a fraudulent throne.
The reality is that in many years, multiple teams could be seen as the best. The number is often two or three. Sometimes it’s four if the top couple aren’t looking bulletproof. Almost never is it more than four. You’re immediately thinking about 2014 when TCU and Baylor famously got left out of the playoff despite having claims on the fourth spot because it so rarely happens that more than four teams can reasonably be seen as potentially No. 1 material.
As long as the playoff field is kept small — and all of the potential No. 1 teams get in the field — then in a certain sense the it doesn’t matter who actually wins the thing. The pretenders like 2015 Michigan State or 2016 Washington lose in the quarterfinals, and then whoever’s left earns the title by beating one or two of the other actual top teams.
“But wait,” you say, “as long as the pretenders lose early, there should be no worry about 9-3 teams winning it all!”
Yes, well, the proposal has the top four teams all being conference champs. That means a true top-four team could end up with the fifth seed and have to play and an extra game.
Maybe they’d always curb-stomp the 12-seed MAC champ or Big Ten West runner up or whatever, but every additional game is an additional chance for anything to happen. If we want the regular season to keep having a lot of meaning, then keeping the postseason small is the best way to do that. A merely above-average team across 12 games beating a clearly superior team across 12 games isn’t a way to show the superior team as being secretly bad but rather an opportunity for luck to negate the results of those 12 games.
I don’t completely begrudge the new system because I do want to see Group of 5 teams get a real shot at a title. They never had one under the BCS, and they didn’t under the Playoff either. Yes, I know about BYU in 1984, but the sport’s landscape was different back then.
I always wanted to see one of the pre-Big 12 TCU teams or classic Boise State teams to get a shot. The only way they could have was pretty much by being perfect multiple years in a row.
The only time it ever seemed possible in the BCS was with how great 2010 Boise State was, but in keeping with my theme about one game, they lost a heartbreaker to a very good Nevada team. It turned out they wouldn’t really have had a shot with undefeated Auburn and Oregon teams making it to the title game, of course. The 2016 Houston team had a chance in the Playoff era after beating top ten FSU to cap 2015 at 13-1 and starting the year with a win over a top-five Oklahoma team, but it ended up losing four games.
The proposed format does at least give more teams something to play for, and it even gives each quartet of teams motivation at the end. You can’t get a first-round bye without a conference title. Finishing in the 5-8 range gets preferential site treatment in the first round. Then getting into the 9-12 range is required to get in the playoff at all.
I expect this proposal to go into effect in 2023. They can’t throw this out there from some of the biggest power brokers in the sport and then tell everyone to wait five years until the present contract expires. It’s as good as a done deal.
As long as the conference is going to be the basic administrative unit of FBS football, then something like this was bound to happen eventually. I’ll grit my teeth one day when some pretender ekes out some victories to take home an undeserved trophy, but I will at least tip my cap to a new system that gives more teams a shot.
The last program to win its first-ever national title was Florida in 1996 (sorry, 2017 UCF). It’s been too long since then. Maybe we’ll go another 25 years before another new team wins its first, but there will be fewer excuses for the trophy-less teams in the meantime.