Four teams are not enough for the CFB playoff, and eight teams are too many, but six is the magic number.
The playoff committee was created to match up the country’s marquee teams, and so far, they have not met their goal. Almost every year, a playoff game features a blowout, creating controversy about whether or not some teams have been deserving of a spot.
This year in the semifinals, Clemson crushed Notre Dame, and Oklahoma never stood a chance versus the Crimson Tide, leaving Ohio State and Georgia upset about being snubbed. A similar dilemma plays out almost every year.
My six team solution would fix everyone’s problems.
Here’s how each team would make the playoff:
- Five of the teams would receive at-large bids by winning their respective Power Five conference.
- Leaving the playoff committee to decide who claims the final slot.
- All six teams would be ranked 1-6 by the playoff committee.
Here’s how the playoff bracket would be set up:
- The two highest ranked teams would receive byes in the first round.
- The third-ranked team will play the sixth-ranked team. The fourth-ranked team will play the fifth-ranked squad two weeks after conference championship weekend. (Mid December)
- The two winners go on to the semifinals to face the top two teams. The first ranked team will play the lowest ranked opponent, leaving the remaining two teams to face each other. Both games will occur on New Years’ Eve, giving a bye to the quarterfinal teams.
- The winners of the semifinals will play each other a week later.
This solution works for just about everyone. No conference can complain about missing out on the playoff. And teams like UCF and Notre Dame would get a fair chance at the playoff with the sixth spot available.
In too many years, there have always been one or two teams left out, never four. Think about an eight-team playoff. Be honest, do you really think teams like UCF or Michigan would stand a chance versus Alabama or Clemson. No, they wouldn’t. Any extra games would increase the likelihood of star players getting hurt and would likely not draw enough fan support to justify playing. In an eight-game playoff, we would only want to watch the middle four teams play each other in the first round anyway.
Instead, by giving a first-round bye to the top two teams, the first round would be much more competitive. An Ohio State vs. Oklahoma game could be legendary. A Washington vs. Notre Dame game would be, well, just okay.
The advantage, in this six-team playoff, is that the top four teams would be clear following the first round. And more importantly, it would give the PAC-12 an equal opportunity.
The current narrative in college football puts the PAC-12 at the bottom of the pecking order, excluded from the playoff the past two years as well as 2015. Not being included three of the five years hurts the conference in a couple of ways.
For one, the conference would receive more money by being granted a playoff team. Yes, the conference distributed $31 million to its 12 schools last year, but that number was $10 million less than the SEC. At the end of the day, PAC-12 teams saw a little less than $1 million per team compared to its SEC counterparts. That’s no chump change.
Ultimately, adding a playoff team each year would undoubtedly help close the gap between the PAC-12 and the SEC. Why? Because money solves the problem. It allows schools update facilities, such as stadiums and locker rooms, which ultimately might help recruiting.
Recruiting needs money. Flying from Oregon to Alabama is a difficult trip. I’m willing to bet there are no direct flights, and in some cases, coaches might need to make two layovers to get somewhere across the country. That’d be an expensive flight, and playoff money would help coaches fly across the country much easier.
Getting to recruits is one thing, but convincing them is another. High profile recruits want a chance to win a championship and make a name for themselves on a national stage, something PAC-12 coaches cannot currently pitch with the current CFB Playoff atmosphere. A one loss PAC-12 champion wouldn’t jump any other conference champion. A one loss Washington State, for example, was the conference’s last chance at making the playoff midway through the year, and writers realized it would still take a miracle for them to make it.
With an automatic bid, coaches can pitch recruits with a simple spiel: we are going to win the conference championship and make the playoffs. Heck, that’s the same pitch that the four other power five conferences must give. The PAC-12 should be allowed to give it as well.
This pitch might help the PAC-12 bring in better recruits. Instead of only getting one team with a top ten class, maybe the PAC-12 can get two or three teams with a top ten class, just like the SEC.
The PAC-12 has a lot of issues. Not consistently making the playoffs is just one, but an issue that has a trigger effect down to recruiting. So I pitch the CFB committee to make a six-team playoff and end conference bias. Don’t put in eight teams, not 16, or 32. Put in six.
Do I think anybody on the committee will ever read this article and make a push for six teams? No, but it’s worth a shot.
Comments
There is generally a lot of hostility
toward the automatic bid concept for conference champions. I think that’s the biggest hiccup with this or with the 8 expansion — the idea that there would be automatic bids for conferences who really don’t have anyone who is as good as the top 4 teams (like the Pac this year). I can see 6 without autobids being an easier sell than 8, because you can tell the 1 and 2 teams that they get a bye out of the process, which could be a significant advantage in some cases.
By Brendan Ross on 01.16.19 3:26pm
No hostility here... in fact..
..it would be the best way to choose 5 of the top 8 teams… start off with 5 legitimate champs and that still leaves plenty of room for deserving independents, non-FBS power conference winners, and FBS power runner-ups, including Georgia, Washington, Ohio St and UCF (..and btw, Fresno St was better than many people realize)…So the playoffs this year woulda looked something like this :
8>4>2>1 Champ
All just as worthy as anything we witnessed this year… but perhaps most importantly Stanford would have been in the playoffs 3 times in the last 8 years, leaving us with a much more equitable inclusion conclusion.
By maddogsfavsnpiks on 01.16.19 4:38pm
Am Totally With Maddog On This
If you go with just six teams, the conference champ automatic bid potentially squeezes out some good teams as there is only room for one more – either independent, smaller conference or runner up. As rightly noted above.
I DO think that conference championships are a legitimate way to pick five teams for the playoffs, with another three teams from the rest of the field. And I don’t think it is always all that clear which conferences are "good" and which ones are "weak" in any given year. There are just not enough inter-conference games to really know. The annual assumption that the SEC is the "best" conference was tested a bit this year. Did Clemson really play anyone until the CFP? No. Was their undefeated season built on a demonstrably better schedule than, say, Notre Dame? No. But they proved beyond a doubt in two games that they were the best team in the country.
Is it perfect? No. Some conferences will have down years and there could be upsets in the conference championship games that send relatively lower ranked teams to the CFP. And you know what, some of those teams may surprise again in the CFP – while truly deserving conference championship game losers will get a second chance.
Whatever issues people may have, it seems more defensible than the current system with only four teams that inevitably leaves out several teams that are, arguably, deserving of being in the CFP. The whining will always be there, but too bad for you if you haven’t won your conference and it would be great to have three slots to reward at large candidates.
By hoyaparanoia on 01.16.19 5:44pm
The point on hostility
Is similar to the point blackjoy is mentioning below.
There was a LOT of discussion about this over at The Athletic during bowl season. That discussion was interesting to me because due to the nature of The Athletic (subscription only site), the participants are all fairly committed fans, but are from all over the place, and are not concentrated in any one region or conference. It is also a serious group and not the typical drive-by troll-dominated internet commentary seen elsewhere. What emerged from that discussion is that there is a kind of polarization on the playoff issue between two groups.
Group One tends to view playoff tournaments, and upsets in them, as being fun, exciting and desirable, and tends to want to see the winner "prove themselves" by running a gauntlet of challengers to reach the title.
Group Two tends to see playoff tournaments as artificial constructs that are unnecessary, that cheapen the "body of work" of the regular season, and that can be unfair to teams that do very well during the regular season by exposing them to an upset loss on a "bad day", which is seen as being meaningless compared to the entire body of work and that "people who want that kind of nonsense can go watch the NFL — college football is not the NFL!", and so on.
The interesting thing is that this kind of sentiment divided wasn’t aligned with conferences or regions — it is simply a divide among the fans of the sport. In the various discussions about how to fix what appears to be a broken bowl season, whenever the idea of automatic bids for conference champions came up there was generally a large outcry against it (again not from fans of only the "have" conferences currently) under the rubric of "a team that loses 2 games doesn’t belong in the playoff!" type sentiment. This was mostly coming from "Group Two" people above, but not exclusively — some of the pro-playoff crowd also didn’t want 2 or more loss teams in a playoff, and so are also hostile to the concept of autobids in the context of a playoff expansion.
Personally I think that until the national semifinals become more competitive generally (we have had a few of them be competitive but most have not been), the argument for expanding the playoff is going to be weak, due to the perception that even with 4 teams today, it seems almost perfunctory.
By Brendan Ross on 01.18.19 5:22am
A reality check is needed on what the goal is
The problem with a lot of the suggestions on this site is that they operate from the perspective that the driving force is a need to identify the #1 team. If that were really the goal, adding more teams to the mix actually reduces the chance that the team that wins will be the best team in the country. A perfect example is the NCAA tournament. That tournament does not identify the #1 team, it produces a conference champion. Those two are not the same thing. When you start adding six+ teams, you’re increasing the odds that luck will influence the outcome. Just because a #8 seed could potentially win a tournament doesn’t suddenly make the #8 seed the best team in the country.
In my opinion, if the goal is to identify the #1 team, then you have to make the entire season, the entire body of work, more meaningful, not less meaningful. The way the CFP works now, you can’t lose two games and get it. The fact that a 2-loss team might be able to beat 1-loss team 9 out of 10 times is irrelevant, the 2-loss team didn’t take care of its business over the entire season. The 1-loss team is rewarded for excellence throughout the entire season by being allowed to compete. I think that should means something. I find it ridiculous that in the NCAA tourney, a 10 loss team can get ONE upset and take the place of a 3-loss team. This is exactly why NBA play-offs is a series of games and not just one game. Anyone can get one upset, that doesn’t make you a better team.
Now, if the goal of the CFP is to generate revenue for the CFP, then yes, you want to add more teams. But I suspect that there is STRONG pressure from various bowl committees not to let that happen. The more teams you add to the CFP, the more you devalue the non-CFP bowls and that might mean far less overall money for the NCAA. I don’t know. But I watched the Georgia vs Texas game with a Bulldog fan. Prior to the game, all he wanted to talk about was how Georgia should have gotten into the CFP. As soon as Georgia started losing he was calling his buddies telling them that this bowl game was meaningless.
On local sports radio here in Seattle, you hear the pro-Husky station having to justify that the Rose Bowl was a good deal and something to be proud of, in order to counter-act the disappointment that UW did not make it to the CFP.
By Blackjoy on 01.17.19 10:28am
Plus One
I think the most entertaining approach would be to go back to the old idea of the "Plus One." Drop the playoff, but select the top two teams after all the other bowl games were played, selecting them by the same current playoff committee.
This would address the lethargy around the regular bowls as well as get a strong champion. To date, the first round of the playoffs has been pretty much a dud, and the other bowls have lost their luster as well. So, with a plus one system:
1. More of the bowl games would matter. They would be showcases for teams to demonstrate why they deserve the chance for the championship game.
2. Fewer players would take off the "meaningless" bowls.
3. We would limit the exposure of players to more and more games, with only two teams each year would play more than the bowl.
The main drawback would be smaller profits due to the reduction of playoff games from three (or more) down to one, but those profits are on the backs of amateur players.
By SN94703 on 01.17.19 11:33am
Disagree with your last sentence
If any individual student, or parent of a student thinks they are getting screwed out of money they deserve, then let them refuse the scholarship. No one is holding a gun to anyone’s head and forcing them to play college sports. If your argument is that the NFL won’t let you play without three years of college, then bring that up with the NFL. The NCAA does not control the NFL or have any way to change the requirements/restriction the NFL puts on incoming players.
College football generates revenue because the universities have built a massive infrastructure to support college football. None of the current players have invested jack squat in building that infrastructure. Nevertheless, they are in position to reap a tremendous benefit in not only getting a free eduction but a chance to become chose to play professional sports. The idea that the players are "earning" the money is laughable. College football earns money because Americans love college football, not because of any individual player.
We can contrast college football with with any other college sport, including basketball (at most schools) where the programs run at a financial loss. Obviously those players are not less qualified as athletes, but their earning power in college is essentially zero. Why? Because of the sport itself and the lack of investment/marketing the NCAA has made in those non-football sports. If was all about the players, then all the sports would be earning money.
The real irony is the players who are good enough to actually sell jersey’s are the ones who are most benefited by college sports as they get the most exposure, the most notoriety, and the easiest path to a professional career. Any NBA prospect would probably be better off playing college ball rather than going oversees to make money. Look at the Ball family. Lavar pulling LeMela/Angelo out of school/college to play oversees has undoubtedly hurt their marketability and future earnings potential versus having left them at UCLA where they could have built up a name for themselves and garnered much more national attention and hype.
So sorry, I disagree that these players are somehow being taken advantage of. And if they disagree, then they should refuse to accept a scholarship to play football and sue the NFL for not having a minor league system. Good luck with that.
By Blackjoy on 01.17.19 1:01pm
Mostly agree
I think it is a factual statement that the profits are "on the backs of the players", but I don’t think it implies they are necessarily being taken advantage of. However, the more games they play, the more things tilt against them in terms of the burden versus the reward. I don’t like the idea of lots of players playing 15 games a year.
By SN94703 on 01.17.19 1:15pm
That I agree with.
I agree with this under the recognition that paying the players doesn’t fix the situation, but reducing the number of games does. I do agree that there is some point at which the demands are too great in the context of having student-athletes.
By Blackjoy on 01.17.19 2:09pm