People all around are saying that this was the best possible season for the introduction of the 12 team playoff. I entirely disagree. I don't think many seasons in the sport's history could've exposed the 12 team playoff worse than this one. Looking back through college football history reveals that most of the time a three loss team wriggles its way into the top 12, even before bowl season, so if all seeds hold in their final regular season games (if all this buzz about Alabama making it over SMU if SMU loses is true, then conference championships are nothing more than regular season games) Alabama being in the playoff isn't the end of the world.
What is the end of the world is the optics of having to choose between 'no thanks' Alabama, 'no thanks' Ole Miss, 'no thanks' Miami, and 'absolutely not' South Carolina. An ideal world would see none of these teams in the playoffs, and I've never heard anybody dispute that. Yet we have to take one of them. That is a problem, and it will never not be a problem for the rest of the history of the sport.
In the spirit of what being a playoff team used to mean, I don't think there are even four of them this season. On that we agree. Oregon, Notre Dame, and..? Who else is there? We would probably have to bring SMU or risk the ACC just not being a power conference anymore, and the fourth team would likely be the SEC auto bid that always unofficially existed in the four team playoff. Either Texas in third or Georgia in fourth.
I think the sport is doing itself a great disservice by allowing all the riff raff in, because popularity figures tend to indicate that people do like dominance. You'll get more total viewers with more games, but less concurrent viewers, which brings less cultural relevance. Baseball's expanded playoffs killed their cultural relevance. Does college football think they're too good for the same thing to happen to them? People crave predictability. The hype for the big matchup. That's why NBA Finals ratings were so high when it was Cavs vs Warriors every year. No die hard basketball fan liked this, but the casuals ate it up.
I'm generally not a fan of placating the casuals, but big playoffs are where casuals and I can find common ground. They're bad for the game, because they often cause the best team and the champion to be different teams, and once you start seeing the best team not be the champion on a regular basis, nobody cares about the championship. Ask NASCAR. Ask MLB and their 'piece of metal' championship trophy.
CFB better hope that either Oregon, Penn State (if they beat Oregon), Notre Dame, Texas (if they beat Georgia), or maybe theoretically Boise State (if they end up with a playoff rematch win over Oregon) win the championship, because if they don't, we're going to have perhaps the least deserving champion in the history of the sport on our hands, and this talk about the worthless championship is going to get started already. Nobody wants that, except apparently the people who thought this 12 team idea was a good idea in the first place.
There is a law of headlines - known as Betteridge's Law- which states that any headline that ends in a question can be answered definitively by the word "no." Both of your questions succumb quickly to Betteridge's Law.
No, there aren't 12 good teams...no, it won't matter immediately...but it will slowly ruin the CFB regular season and rivalries as they expand the entrants further (making losses less relevant) and make the season all about the Playoffs. I'll throw in another one as a bonus since the media isn't keeping score here of their own mistakes here...no, adding more teams will not resolve the FSU/JMU border disputes as the media assured you it would. Ask South Carolina.
In fact, the more you expand the Playoffs, the more teams think they should be in the mix. It's basic human nature. Most programs can get comfortable acknowledging that they are perhaps not in the top 4...but top 12? Screw that, we should be in!
The key here is to understand what the CFB Playoff really is at its core. It has nothing to do with merit or finding the truly best team in college football as your headlines ponder. Think about it. If you wanted to discern those attributes, you, and a group of friends at a bar would produce a far superior system for doing that in 15 minutes max... long before the buzz kicked in.
See, the CFB Playoff is in fact a television show for the masses. Its DNA is closer to productions like the Apprentice or Top Chef or Survivor than the Olympics. In fact, making Mark Burnett the producer would undoubtedly make it more entertaining. Dude's got mad skills in this realm.
He would spend more time on pregame background stories (the upstart new coach fighting portal and NIL deficiencies against all odds.... the transfer player from Penn State trying to prove James Franklin and the world wrong...Kirby Smart's weight loss journey...etc.) along with an endless series of tight isolation shots during games - a combination Hard Knocks and Survivor. I guarantee you would eat it up.
Yet, when you learn the winner of say Top Chef, do you immediately conclude that they were the best chef in the group? Of course not, you either agree or disagree based on purely ephemeral emotional reactions like hating Tom because he was pretentious during Q&A or rooting against Jill since she wasn't a team player during the kitchen fire. You leave with empty calorie entertainment that you immediately forget until the next season. It means nothing really.
Talk is cheap, so I wanted to put in a stake in the ground on this issue four months ago - what the kids today call a receipt. On August 9th on Neil Paine's Substack I commented (you can look it up) that the expansion would accomplish nothing beyond driving more sweaty money. There were no moral dilemmas of sports being slayed by expansion...no higher purposes being pursued. So, I picked the four teams from which one team - at the very end - will likely be the champion. I picked Oregon, Ohio State, Georgia, and Texas.
Now, it's possible that the winner will be none of those. As the Greeks used to say, the future is unwritten, and when it is written, it will be written by the hands of the gods. Until then, a quick "wisdom of crowds" thought experiment. If you were to create a wager where the public could choose my four August teams or the CFB Playoff remaining field when finalized...which one would drive the most money?
Some questions are unintentionally rhetorical.
But think about that for a moment. Some dude on Substack picked the likely field of 4 to win it before the season even started that the masses would agree with after the season was over but before the Playoffs began. See, it's all very predictable.... same as it ever was. Nothing has changed from expansion other than public misconceptions that it is somehow more "fair" or "better" because more teams are involved - it isn't.
My purpose here isn't to be disagreeable or argumentative but to enlighten. To help others understand what is coming in a few years.... threats of a separate and exclusive SEC Big 10 "Super Tournament" unless real changes are made. Followed by an NCAA's Hail Mary of sorts to save the whole affair - further expansion to 16 or beyond, no automatic bids, expanded guaranteed slots for the SEC and Big 10 teams and computer rankings to slot it all.
But you and your readers shouldn't worry about all that – trust me, it will still be the same Survivor Island and ending just with different participants...and perhaps more isolation shots.
People all around are saying that this was the best possible season for the introduction of the 12 team playoff. I entirely disagree. I don't think many seasons in the sport's history could've exposed the 12 team playoff worse than this one. Looking back through college football history reveals that most of the time a three loss team wriggles its way into the top 12, even before bowl season, so if all seeds hold in their final regular season games (if all this buzz about Alabama making it over SMU if SMU loses is true, then conference championships are nothing more than regular season games) Alabama being in the playoff isn't the end of the world.
What is the end of the world is the optics of having to choose between 'no thanks' Alabama, 'no thanks' Ole Miss, 'no thanks' Miami, and 'absolutely not' South Carolina. An ideal world would see none of these teams in the playoffs, and I've never heard anybody dispute that. Yet we have to take one of them. That is a problem, and it will never not be a problem for the rest of the history of the sport.
In the spirit of what being a playoff team used to mean, I don't think there are even four of them this season. On that we agree. Oregon, Notre Dame, and..? Who else is there? We would probably have to bring SMU or risk the ACC just not being a power conference anymore, and the fourth team would likely be the SEC auto bid that always unofficially existed in the four team playoff. Either Texas in third or Georgia in fourth.
I think the sport is doing itself a great disservice by allowing all the riff raff in, because popularity figures tend to indicate that people do like dominance. You'll get more total viewers with more games, but less concurrent viewers, which brings less cultural relevance. Baseball's expanded playoffs killed their cultural relevance. Does college football think they're too good for the same thing to happen to them? People crave predictability. The hype for the big matchup. That's why NBA Finals ratings were so high when it was Cavs vs Warriors every year. No die hard basketball fan liked this, but the casuals ate it up.
I'm generally not a fan of placating the casuals, but big playoffs are where casuals and I can find common ground. They're bad for the game, because they often cause the best team and the champion to be different teams, and once you start seeing the best team not be the champion on a regular basis, nobody cares about the championship. Ask NASCAR. Ask MLB and their 'piece of metal' championship trophy.
CFB better hope that either Oregon, Penn State (if they beat Oregon), Notre Dame, Texas (if they beat Georgia), or maybe theoretically Boise State (if they end up with a playoff rematch win over Oregon) win the championship, because if they don't, we're going to have perhaps the least deserving champion in the history of the sport on our hands, and this talk about the worthless championship is going to get started already. Nobody wants that, except apparently the people who thought this 12 team idea was a good idea in the first place.
. . . holding onto hope for South Carolina - such an explosive QB. Go, Gamecocks!
There is a law of headlines - known as Betteridge's Law- which states that any headline that ends in a question can be answered definitively by the word "no." Both of your questions succumb quickly to Betteridge's Law.
No, there aren't 12 good teams...no, it won't matter immediately...but it will slowly ruin the CFB regular season and rivalries as they expand the entrants further (making losses less relevant) and make the season all about the Playoffs. I'll throw in another one as a bonus since the media isn't keeping score here of their own mistakes here...no, adding more teams will not resolve the FSU/JMU border disputes as the media assured you it would. Ask South Carolina.
In fact, the more you expand the Playoffs, the more teams think they should be in the mix. It's basic human nature. Most programs can get comfortable acknowledging that they are perhaps not in the top 4...but top 12? Screw that, we should be in!
The key here is to understand what the CFB Playoff really is at its core. It has nothing to do with merit or finding the truly best team in college football as your headlines ponder. Think about it. If you wanted to discern those attributes, you, and a group of friends at a bar would produce a far superior system for doing that in 15 minutes max... long before the buzz kicked in.
See, the CFB Playoff is in fact a television show for the masses. Its DNA is closer to productions like the Apprentice or Top Chef or Survivor than the Olympics. In fact, making Mark Burnett the producer would undoubtedly make it more entertaining. Dude's got mad skills in this realm.
He would spend more time on pregame background stories (the upstart new coach fighting portal and NIL deficiencies against all odds.... the transfer player from Penn State trying to prove James Franklin and the world wrong...Kirby Smart's weight loss journey...etc.) along with an endless series of tight isolation shots during games - a combination Hard Knocks and Survivor. I guarantee you would eat it up.
Yet, when you learn the winner of say Top Chef, do you immediately conclude that they were the best chef in the group? Of course not, you either agree or disagree based on purely ephemeral emotional reactions like hating Tom because he was pretentious during Q&A or rooting against Jill since she wasn't a team player during the kitchen fire. You leave with empty calorie entertainment that you immediately forget until the next season. It means nothing really.
Talk is cheap, so I wanted to put in a stake in the ground on this issue four months ago - what the kids today call a receipt. On August 9th on Neil Paine's Substack I commented (you can look it up) that the expansion would accomplish nothing beyond driving more sweaty money. There were no moral dilemmas of sports being slayed by expansion...no higher purposes being pursued. So, I picked the four teams from which one team - at the very end - will likely be the champion. I picked Oregon, Ohio State, Georgia, and Texas.
Now, it's possible that the winner will be none of those. As the Greeks used to say, the future is unwritten, and when it is written, it will be written by the hands of the gods. Until then, a quick "wisdom of crowds" thought experiment. If you were to create a wager where the public could choose my four August teams or the CFB Playoff remaining field when finalized...which one would drive the most money?
Some questions are unintentionally rhetorical.
But think about that for a moment. Some dude on Substack picked the likely field of 4 to win it before the season even started that the masses would agree with after the season was over but before the Playoffs began. See, it's all very predictable.... same as it ever was. Nothing has changed from expansion other than public misconceptions that it is somehow more "fair" or "better" because more teams are involved - it isn't.
My purpose here isn't to be disagreeable or argumentative but to enlighten. To help others understand what is coming in a few years.... threats of a separate and exclusive SEC Big 10 "Super Tournament" unless real changes are made. Followed by an NCAA's Hail Mary of sorts to save the whole affair - further expansion to 16 or beyond, no automatic bids, expanded guaranteed slots for the SEC and Big 10 teams and computer rankings to slot it all.
But you and your readers shouldn't worry about all that – trust me, it will still be the same Survivor Island and ending just with different participants...and perhaps more isolation shots.
Thanks for the time.