Fixing the College Football Playoff
We have officially lost the plot.
With reports surfacing that Power 4 commissioners are gently pushing for yet another playoff expansion to 16 teams, I start to ask myself, where does it end? At what point will the game that I have spent almost every single Saturday of the last 24 years watching become completely unrecognizable?
I think it might already be there.
The original 4-team playoff was announced on June 26, 2012, and implemented after the 2014 regular season. The justification was that the BCS model failed to capture the intangible components of the season, and the playoff selection process allowed for contextual judgement and a more inclusive and fair system, with 4 teams instead of 2. Proponents of the playoff reasoned that there was a lower chance of deserving teams being left out, because in the past the #3 team in the final BCS rankings often was also an elite team with championship aspirations.
However, since the inception of the playoff, we’ve seen more controversy than clarity. The selection process, run by a committee of university administrators and former coaches, is inherently flawed. The lack of objectivity, rampant bias toward specific conferences and teams, and prioritization of revenue over the integrity of the sport have all diluted the product.
Expanding to 16 teams would only amplify these problems. Increasing guaranteed bids for the SEC and Big Ten further entrenches the power imbalance. The playoff would become less about letting the true best teams fight for a title, and more about ensuring the most profitable matchups. We’d see even more undeserving teams in the playoff (See: Tennessee, Indiana, arguably SMU and ASU although I would defend those two) getting their teeth kicked in on national television due to arbitrary criteria and media narratives. That isn’t fun to watch, and it makes bowl games increasingly irrelevant. The soul of the sport is overtly under attack by corporate greed, the lack of which being what made this sport so great for so long. I could write a novel about what exactly has led to college football being stripped of everything that made it lovable, but you can pick from whichever option fits your narrative better – ESPN, Vegas, TV revenue (I’m looking at you Longhorn Network), Oklahoma and UGA in the supreme court, NIL, etc.
To fix the playoff, and make all bowl games meaningful again, we need to restore objectivity and exclusivity. This is not a diversity initiative, this is football – not everyone should be included, and in fact, most teams should feel left out and use that motivation to stop being so bad. The BCS model, while flawed, got two things right: it leaned on data and algorithms rather than human subjectivity; and, it celebrated the New Years 6 and other bowl games for having interesting matchups that were allowed to mean something to the fanbases. Its biggest flaw was giving too much weight to preseason rankings, which often locked teams into favorable spots before they proved anything on the field. Instead of throwing out the model entirely, we should enhance it.
Here’s my solution: Revert the playoff back to 4 teams. Use a modernized computer algorithm similar to the BCS, but more refined. Strip away the preseason ranking bias and instead, weigh in-season performance metrics more heavily. Introduce a small percentage of human input from a committee of sports writers without direct or indirect financial ties to outcomes. This would maintain the spirit of contextual judgment (the “eye test”) without sacrificing objectivity.
College football deserves a playoff system that rewards excellence, not brand power – and this is coming from an Oklahoma alumnus that (currently) stands to benefit greatly from an expanded playoff model that rewards TV ratings over excellence. The sport’s most passionate fans (me and my fraternity brothers) don’t want to see it devolve into a cash-grab spectacle. CFP committee, NCAA, President Trump, whoever is in charge of this – get your heads out of your asses and fix the playoff before it’s too late.