Bowls or Playoffs? College Football Needs to Decide

College football has reached the ultimate fork in the road.

Since I started watching college football as a kid in the late 1980’s, the notion of a playoff has lingered over the sport. The problem, of course, was the bowl system. You couldn’t have both.

As we stand here in 2022, those who run college football foolishly think both is possible, as evident by their braindead 12-team playoff proposal. There’s also an 8-team playoff proposal apparently floating around between conference commissioners.

Either option will fail spectacularly, because it’s not a true playoff and destroys the bowl system.

The solution is clear. College football has a choice to make. Either they keep the current four-team playoff within the bowl system (and hopefully moving the semifinals to New Year’s Day) or expand to a true16-team playoff that includes every conference champion.

That’s it. That’s the decision college football faces. Unfortunately, no one in charge of college football has the guts or forethought to force this decision to be made.

I know there are many who want the playoff expanded for a variety of reasons. To be clear, I am not against expansion if it gets us to a full playoff. But I am against the half-assed 12-team proposal that creates more problems than it solves.

Let’s start with the most obvious, which has been the sticking point: who are those 6 conference champions? Is it the top 6 ranked conference champions or do the Power Five champions get grandfathered in? What’s the point of playing college football every year for the 4 conferences that wouldn’t even get a champion into the tournament?

Imagine if the NCAA Tournament for basketball had a cutoff of how many conference champions made the field. It’s almost impossible to imagine because it’s such a stupid, terrible idea. That a similar idea is lauded by college football writers shows they don’t know how things work in reality.

The second big issue with the 12-team playoff – or an 8-team version – is where to play the games. The 12-team proposal included the last three rounds being played in bowl games. What? On what planet are people making three separate trips to watch their team play in bowl games? You’d have to be insanely rich and not have a job to make that happen.

Notre Dame poked another hole in the 12-team proposal when they publicly admitted that the requirement that the top 4 teams would get byes didn’t matter to them, because the first round would be played on campus. When a team would willingly choose to play an extra playoff game, then the byes don’t matter or provide any advantage. Imagine if Aaron Rodgers and the Packers said “no thanks” this year to a bye so they could play on Wild Card weekend. Yet this is the plan to save college football?

There’s also the little problem of the bowl system as a whole, which drives so much of the economics behind the sport. A 12-team playoff tries to keep the bowl games relevant, but even a four-team playoff has rendered those games irrelevant to many people. You only have to look to the postseason NIT to see how that would go.

To put it bluntly, the 12-team playoff will fail. It’s not a true playoff and it ruins the bowl season all while making the last month of the season meaningless for the very top teams.

This is the fork in the road that college football finds themselves in. For some reason, instead of going left or right, they seem hellbent on plowing straight into the mountain in front of them. They think it will make them more money. In the short-term, it absolutely will. Unfortunately, the damage done by that decision will ultimately destroy the sport. It’s a compromise that helps no one.

What is the answer? I don’t know.

If college football choose bowls, then they have the proper system in place with a four-team playoff. It simply needs to be scheduled and marketed better. Don’t play semifinals games on New Years’ Eve afternoon. Don’t have ESPN completely ignore the non-playoff games. Make the non-playoff games feel important and special by promoting them. Ratings were actually up in 2021 for those bowls, so it’s not like the general public is done with bowl games.

If college football chooses playoffs, then put a proper playoff system in place. Give automatic bids to each of the 10 conference champions. Move the first two rounds on-campus so fans aren’t forced to spend thousands of dollars and travel for three games. Give teams at the top an actual reward and something to play for, similar to the NFL, so those games in late November still matter even if you’re Alabama and guaranteed a top seed.

If this all seems too simple, that’s because it is. College football, as has been the case for my entire life of loving the sport, always makes things so much more difficult than it needs to be.

There’s a choice to be made. College football needs to make it. Forget about formats and schedule and TV deals. The 10 conference commissioners and Notre Dame – the 11 votes that count – need to figure it out.

Bowls or playoffs? Answer that, and the rest is easy.

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