There Is Such a Thing as Too Much College Football

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Tony Petitti is the commissioner of the Big Ten, one half of the bicameral legislature that now presides over college football.

The conference is not known for its way with numbers. Exhibit A: the Big Ten has 18 teams. They’re not too concerned with the details. They’re just into more. The possibility that they just break off with the now-16-member SEC and go form a college football superleague of their own is not out of play.

I don’t know if they would see an issue with a single mega-conference featuring 34 teams (which, after all, is roughly the size of a professional sports league in this country). They already have 18 now. That’s not even double! Why not? Where do I sign?

I don’t think that’d be a great idea, personally, but I’m not as convinced that the powers that be in those conferences will agree with me in perpetuity. The Overton Window of college football has been shifting awfully fast lately. Mostly for the better, I’d argue, but some for the worse.¹

This would be an example of the worse. The Big Ten recently leaked what is pretty clearly a dumb idea to expand the College Football Playoff to 28 teams, which is over double the current 12-team format. It’s kind of insane. Per CBS Sports:

“The primary model discussed among Big Ten leadership includes seven automatic qualifiers for the Big Ten and SEC, with five apiece for the ACC and Big 12. The Group of Six would receive two berths, and two more teams would get at-large spots.”

Seven! Apiece! 14 teams, exactly half of the field, would come from the two conferences that call all the shots, and it would be mandatory. Last season, that would’ve included a middling Missouri team and Michigan in a down year. They got up for Ohio State, and that was about it. But they’d have been playing for it all, because that’s the way we’d have drawn it up.

This is where I remind everyone that, up until last year, we were playing this tournament with a 4-team field. I supported that move, in large part because I think 12 teams might be pushing it a little, and we’re probably going to continue seeing tough-watch blowouts like Penn State > SMU, OSU > Tennessee, Penn State > Boise State, etc., but it’s not outlandish.

The number’s in range if we’re comparing it to a professional league like the NFL, which brings in 14 playoff teams. Many of them are lambs to the slaughter too. Tune-up games for the real contenders. But sometimes you’ll get that Texas-ASU game, and that’s not such a bad thing, is it?

I can already detect in my analysis here a bit of imprecision. I don’t think there’s an arbitrary dividing line at which the playoff field is perfect and the regular season matters the exact right amount. This is all a guessing game, and the goalposts shift with the teams we’re presented. There will be years where we might wish we could just go back down to 4, because that’s all we’ll really want to watch, so we’ll just wait for the semis.

There might also be years when the contenders go 8 deep, and we get to see some fireworks throughout. I don’t know. I doubt that list will ever extend to 12, personally, but what do I know? I further doubt that that list will ever make it to 16, which strikes me as more than we need. But you know what I can say? 28 is more than anyone needs. And this is clearly absurd.

That’s part of the point, I gather. This feels like that old sophomoric negotiating tactic, where you start with a ridiculous proposal and then look reasonable when you settle somewhere closer to the original idea. The Big Ten might be telling themselves that by starting from a position of 28 teams, they have a better chance of making 16 teams sound normal.

And they might be right. I’d just love it if we could agree, as a nation, that for all the turmoil around this sport — and there’s been plenty — more is not always the answer.

I’ll go ahead and risk the policy comparison. Much of our politics these days treat regulations as bad, through and through, in and of themselves. But most of us are aware that without any regulations — be those antitrust laws, labor laws, environmental regulations, consumer protection laws, the list goes on — corporations and the industries they make up will not concern themselves with their impact on society at large.

That’s not their job. And to act as if they’re truly equipped to police themselves on that front, just by the grace of sound judgment, would be pretty naive. It’s an easy applause line, using bureaucratic regulations as a punching bag, but one does need some rules of the road in order to end up with a positive force for society.

Which brings us back to college football. The conferences are not hugely concerned with the betterment of the sport at large. They’re not even concerned with the betterment of fans. Not really. They’re concerned with the betterment of themselves. The conferences are corporations, in all the ways that matter. Legally, they’re non-profits, as are the schools that make them up. As such, they return value to those schools rather than shareholders. But again, those are distinctions that don’t make a difference to their priorities.

They’re in it for them. That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s just a fact. And for all the NCAA’s faults, this is the sort of thing that you could really use a governing body to litigate. Somebody who can take a look at this and say: hey, guys? We sure about this?

I don’t expect this 28-team fever dream thing to happen. Ever, hopefully. I’m just a little more worried than I should be that the guardrails don’t exist to resist that. If the SEC were on board with this — and, for the record, I don’t think they are — then what would stop it? Seriously! We’re banking on very little here. Let’s exercise some restraint, people.

🎾 Had an absolute blast at the U.S. Open Fan Week this week. If you’re unaware of this, as I was until this week, it’s free entry to the public, and you can either walk up to any one of the grandstand courts and watch a qualifier match up close or go into one of the stadiums to watch the top players practice. And they really hit, too! You get to see it. Across two hours Thursday, in this order, I watched Carlos Alcaraz, Lorenzo Musetti, Jannik Sinner, Novak Djokovic and Alexander Zverev rip shots and pal around from maybe ~50 feet away. Again, this is free. Would do again.

📚 Book Corner resumes with a Booker Prize winner from the year 2001, True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey. (Fun fact, by the way — it narrowly beat out Atonement by Ian McEwan.) It’s inspired by a real outlaw named Ned Kelly who I gather is kinda like the Jesse James of Australia. In the spirit of full disclosure, I first picked this book up several months ago, read 20 pages and put it down, frustrated with the narrator. There are no commas in this book, the grammar’s a mess. So it takes some getting used to, but I’m glad I went back. I was ready for it on round two, and it was a lot of fun to go through. The voice really works, you just have to settle in for it.

🥊 Khamzat Chimaev soundly beat Dricus Du Plessis last weekend for the UFC middleweight title. The run-up to that pay-per-view was a pretty funny one, considering that the sport was selling that fight while simultaneously telling everyone that PPV was dead and buried with their Paramount deal. The other interesting thing about the fight, which

Karim Zidan

notes in his latest, is that after Russia invaded Ukraine with help from Chechen forces, Chimaev Chimaev was barred from stepping foot in the U.S. due to American sanctions. We interviewed Karim for a Search Party video I worked on last year, profiling Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov and his cozy ties to the world of combat sports. Check that out here.

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