The format. The schedule. The locations. They’re all wrong.
But other than that, the 12-team college football playoff will be fine.
Who else is excited about a semifinal game at a neutral site
on a random Thursday in January? Who isn’t excited about on-campus college
football games four days before Christmas with no students?
College football is about to learn why “you never get a
second chance to make a first impression” is a lesson most of us learned before
leaving our teenage years.
The reason for the impending failure is the same reason for
its rushed start – greed. The people running college football see dollar signs and
they’re chasing them, much to the detriment of the sport.
To be clear, an expanded playoff is needed.
The BCS wasn’t working, and the four-team playoff only proved to be a cruel tease. We aren’t quite there yet to the utopian vision of a 16-team playoff, but we’re getting there. It’ll be messy through 2024 and
2025, as the 12-team version falters.
We’ve been here before, of course. In April 2014, I
predicted the death of the four-team playoff before it even started. Why?
Because the format and schedule were all wrong.
Anyone with a brain should have figured out instantly after
Year 1 that all college football fans really want is the semifinals on New Year’s Day, with one of those games in the Rose Bowl, followed by a title game
a week or so later. That happened twice since the four-team playoff started –
the COVID year ruined a third instance – and those years (2014 and 2017) were
by far the high-water mark when it came to ratings.
You’d think college football leaders would see that and try
to recreate it. Instead, they’ve decided to start a new playoff system in the
stupidest way possible.
So let’s go over why the 12-team playoff will fail, starting
with the big one.
The Schedule
Whoever came up with the playoff schedules for 2024 and 2025
should be fired right now. Forget firing them when it fails. Fire them right
now.
The quarterfinals include three games on New Year’s Day and
one on New Year’s Eve. Why New Year’s Eve? Because apparently a decade of
people not watching football on New Year’s Eve – unless it falls on a Saturday
– wasn’t enough to convince them that football on New Year’s Eve is a bad idea.
The first semifinal games will take place on Thursday,
January 8, 2025, and Friday, January 9, 2025. I’m sure I could think of dumber
times to play important college football games if I really thought about it.
The title game is scheduled for Monday, January 19, 2025.
Because when one thinks about college football, they think “three weeks after
New Year’s Day in the heat of the NFL playoffs.”
I don’t think I’m breaking any news here, but nothing
touches the NFL, not even college football. There is no room for anything in
late January except for the NFL playoffs. That’s a fact.
The worst part about this schedule is how college football
has chosen to take on the NFL instead of playing the first two rounds in early
December. The NFL’s new 18-week schedule has shifted its entire late season
schedule to January. They are giving college football the month of December and
college football refuses to accept it.
If only this was the one problem with the playoff, alas…
The Locations
To win a national championship in the current four-team
playoff, a team will have to play two bowl games and likely a neutral-site
conference title game. Add in a September neutral site game, and we’re already
up to 4 games where fans have to pay for travel and tickets.
Do we really need to add another?
Yes, the quarterfinals being played at bowl sites is
insanely stupid and will not last past the first two years. It begs the
question of why they’re doing it at all.
No one except the richest boosters will be able to travel to
three consecutive playoff games. Isn’t the point of a playoffs to give teams
home-field advantage?
We already know the system is broken because the athletic
director at Notre Dame is one of the people responsible for the plan, which
means his team will never get a first-round bye. And he doesn’t care! He
publicly said he’d rather have a first-round home game to earn their way into
the quarterfinal.
Let’s stop and embrace the insanity for a minute. Notre Dame
could be an undefeated #1 team and would not receive a first-round bye, yet
everyone at the school is good with that. Hello, college football, your idea
sucks.
It leads to our final reason the system will fail…
The Format
I’ve been a proponent of a 16-team playoff with 10 automatic
bids and 6 at-large bids for over a decade now. The 12-team format is similar,
but stupidly different.
For one, instead of four lower conferences getting a playoff
shot – those four teams are replaced by byes. Imagine if the NCAA Tournament in
basketball didn’t have any #16 seeds getting a shot at #1 seeds. Would you want
that?
Secondly, giving first-round byes to only conference
champions destroys the integrity of the entire bracket.
Last year’s semifinals featured two teams - TCU and Ohio St
- who did not win their conference championships. So the four byes would have
gone to Georgia, Michigan, Utah, and Clemson.
Yes, the Utah and Clemson teams you saw getting demolished
in bowl games last year would’ve received first-round byes because TCU lost a
title game and the Big Ten had two of the best four teams.
The notion of division champs getting a bye in pro sports
makes sense because there is a limited number of 30-32 teams playing very
similar schedules. That’s not the case in college football. Clemson and TCU
played 26 regular season games in 2022, and neither played a common opponent.
Why does Clemson get a bye because the ACC sucked compared to the Big 12?
What Will Happen
To recap, the 12-team playoff format is messed up while the
games will be played at the wrong time in the wrong places.
The 12-team playoff will juice the regular season in 2024,
and then the playoff games will start. There will be more blowouts. There will
be empty seats at playoff games. The ratings will not meet expectations. There
will be much handwringing.
By 2026, college football must fix these issues. The
semifinals must be on New Year’s Day. The quarterfinals must be moved to campus
sites. The field must be expanded to include an auto bid from all 10
conferences.
College football is speeding into a brick wall because they
only care about money. They’re hastily launching an expanded playoff to line
their pockets today without thinking about the future of the sport.
My only hope is that the failure of the 12-team playoff is
quick, so they can get it right by 2026.
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