By Mark Nagi
The College Football Playoff is broken. I know it. You know it. We all know it.
From the completely unnecessary weekly ranking programs to the inherent bias towards Alabama, to their absurd parameters that they may or may not follow, the entire system is an exercise in futility.
It makes me long for those halcyon days of the Bowl Championship Series, even if the BCS had its own share of problems.
So here is my foolproof plan to correct the many issues of the CFB Playoff. I’m sure that you would agree with all my recommendations.
First, 12 teams are WAY too many. I know that they are going to probably expand to 16 or (gulp) 24 teams soon, but that’s a massive mistake. Going from four to 12 teams was a massive mistake in itself. Reduce the field to eight teams.
Once there are eight teams, we do away with byes. That shouldn’t be a big deal at all. Seven of the eight teams that had byes lost in their first playoff game in the two years this farce of a system has been in place. This season, No. 4 seed Texas Tech had to face No. 5 seed Oregon in Miami. No. 2 seed Ohio State played No. 10 seed Miami… in Arlington. If you play well all season to earn one of the top four seeds, you should have the advantage of playing on your campus.
Had that Oregon/Texas Tech game been played in Lubbock, it would have been the biggest night in the history of that city. Instead, the game was played at a neutral site near neither school, just like we saw with Ohio State/Miami.
College football games should be played on campus. It’s what makes the sport so special. Increasingly, we see what could be a great home and home series in the regular season reduced to a one-time occurrence at an NFL stadium. Count me out.
Along those same lines, we are going to do away with the bowl games until the championship contest. The college football hierarchy is so beholden to the bowls that we didn’t get anything resembling a playoff system until the late 1990s. The bowls are hanging on by a thread and will go kicking and screaming into the future.
But how does it benefit the fans of these teams to be sent back and forth across the country? Think about it like this… if a team like Miami were to get into the title game, their fans would be told to travel to College Station, Arlington, Tempe, and … well, they’d be home for the championship game. But you get my point. All that travel within four weeks? No thanks.
Now, in terms of who gets in… bring back the BCS computers and let them determine the top eight teams. There is just no way to do this without biases creeping in. As it is, seeing sitting athletics directors voting on their team or teams in their conference is ridiculous.
Human beings are biased. There is no other explanation for why Alabama was gifted spots in the playoffs in 2023 and 2025. Get humans out of the selection process.
But I’m not naïve. I know those committee members want their steak dinners and expense accounts. So, if they aren’t going anywhere, let’s help them a bit. Do away with all conference championship games. I know they are money makers (and there’s never enough money), but if the committee is going to move Alabama from 10th and 9th position after they got their doors blown off by Georgia in the SEC title game, what’s the point? Games either matter or they don’t. If they don’t, eliminate them.
And finally, for the love of all that is good and holy, do away with the farce of the weekly selection shows. Just announce who makes the field after the end of the regular season. Moving teams up or down haphazardly creates so much distrust among fans, and rightfully so. We don’t need to see it on ESPN.
You see, a foolproof plan. I look forward to seeing it in action this Fall.
