College Football Playoff tweaks
Some obvious changes should be made for next year. Any major changes can wait for awhile
Now that the new and improved College Football Playoff has produced a classic semifinal game already there is no better time to discuss making a more perfect CFP. A couple of obvious changes would make this endeavor better. As we prepare to enjoy what looks to be another semifinal classic tonight, I offer a modest proposal for some solutions. Later I’ll lay out some more complicated and perhaps controversial ideas to improve the sport.
Tweak One: Scrap the weekly CFP rankings. This would eliminate some of the confusion and anxiety about the last couple of places in the playoff and how teams are ranked. There is no need for a peek behind the curtain before the regular season is over. Let others play that game like they already do. This would also curtail a lot of the whining of three-loss teams.
The CFP committee should have one job: choose and seed the field. Ranking teams for several weeks should not be any part of the committee’s work. If ESPN wants to have its little weekly show for the month before the field is revealed, that’s fine. I find it to be a boring waste of time. They spend an hour talking about the same handful of teams and their “experts” offer the same exact talking points week after week. They don’t need any kind of official CFP ranking to engage in this nonsense.
Tweak Two: More home games. While most of the first-round games turned into blowouts, nevertheless the on-campus games gave us electric atmospheres and excitement. Imagine how much more excitement there would have been if the games had been close! The quarterfinal games at bowl sites - most of which did not sell out - just didn’t have that same excitement even though only one of them offered any real excitement (ASU v Texas).
Quarterfinal games must be on-campus affairs. It makes no sense for teams that earn byes from the first round do not get the advantage of hosting a playoff game. Getting one of the top four seeds ought to come with the benefit of a hosting a home game. Moreover, it is asking too much of fan bases to not only pay inflated prices for tickets but then also demand they travel to neutral sites where they will pay gouging-level prices for hotels and plane tickets. It’s also great for the local economies for those games to be on campuses. The powers-that-be who run the sport ought to show more loyalty to their college towns than the cities who host bowl games.
Tweak Three: Change the seeding philosophy. The current seeding process is obviously a mistake. Well-intentioned but a mistake, nonetheless. Additionally, byes shouldn’t automatically go to conference champions. Oregon wins the Big Ten and they’re rewarded with a rematch against Ohio State while Penn State, who lost to Oregon in the B1G title game, gets a lower-seeded Boise State. Seeding should be based on the committee’s understanding of the relative strengths of the teams. They should also consider re-seeding after each round.
Now on to the more complicated and perhaps controversial changes I think should be made…
• The calendar. This probably has more to do with the entirety of the season rather than only the playoff and I doubt this could be changed for a few years. The first round ought to occur during the second weekend of December. The quarterfinals should be played the next week. Semis the third Saturday. Semis could even be played on New Year’s Day if that’s what most people would want. Or the final could be played that day. I think most fans would prefer a full day’s worth of games on NYD so the final will likely never be played on Jan 1.
However, the final should never be as late as January 20 like this year’s. The final should be the first Monday of January unless that day is New Year’s Day. Then the final should be the following week. Games other than the final should be played on Saturdays because weeknight games are an inconvenience, for some people they are a major inconvenience, i.e. most fans who attend games. We shouldn’t shit on the fans who actually purchase tickets and show up.
Some people are going to point out that the Army-Navy game has to be played the second Saturday in December. My response: no, no it does not. It was regularly played in November for decades.1 So that game can return to an earlier date. Or it can keep being played when it is. I truly don’t care. Let them do whatever they want. But the playoff final should never be played in the second half of January.
• Neutral sites for the semifinals and the championship game should be chosen through a bidding process. Put out a request for proposal open to any city desiring to host the games. 2
You may be asking yourself, “But what about the bowls?” What about ‘em? The bowls should get no special consideration for hosting playoff games. The schools owe them nothing. The bowls spent decades printing money off the backs of the teams and a lot of them even had the gall to charge the schools the price of a ticket to seat marching band members. The same bands who provided free entertainment to the bowls.
Memo to the bowls: you can host your little games whenever you want, but if you want to host CFP games, you can place a bid just like anybody else.
• Expanding the field. Some college football cognoscenti already want to expand the number of teams given bids.3 I’m not opposed to that in principle. I think a field of fourteen or sixteen would be pretty good. But can we maybe let this format play out a few times before we expand it?
One thing in the area of playoff expansion I am vehemently opposed to is any scheme that guarantees multiple bids to the SEC and Big Ten. First of all, they do not need guaranteed spots. Pretty much every year each of these leagues will have at least three teams among the twelve best teams in the country. Secondly, their piggish greed should not be rewarded more than it already has. The playoff should be a national playoff not the SEC-B1G Challenge. I think automatic bids for the five best conference champions and seven wildcards is a very fair system. Automatic bids for the five best conference champions and nine or eleven wildcards would also be a very fair system. And if you’re not good enough to finish higher than fourth in your conference, do you really have a legitimate beef? Any system that does not guarantee bids to five conference champions will not be a true playoff in my mind. Let’s remember one very important thing: a playoff is to determine a champion, not the best team. These are actually two different concepts and while the best team often ends up as champion, that is not always the case.
Furthermore, because we have these vulgar and monstrously large conferences, we do not get anything close to balanced schedules. So, the whole strength-of-schedule argument is nothing but hot air to me. The best thing for college football would be for the schools to abandon the selfish, only-in-it-for-themselves mentality on display now. The NFL does not operate this way. Each NFL division does not negotiate for separate TV deals. The broadcasters don’t get to decide that they won’t televise a certain small market team because that team won’t draw as high a rating as big market teams.
By operating the way they do, the college game leaves a ridiculous amount of money on the table. Most media deal experts say college football is tremendously undervalued. Some say by as much has half. The colleges are making only half the money they could be making from TV deals! Think about that. It’s quite stunning!! This is a direct function of each conference negotiating separately, which is in essence negotiating against each other.
Lots of folks yearn for a college commissioner or ‘czar’ to get things back in order. This is a fantasy unless the schools unite and work together to run the sport in such a way that is more inclusive and grows the pie for everyone. And that won’t happen absent two crucial things: 1) conferences (Big Ten and SEC specifically) would have to give up quite a bit of power and, 2) the schools coming to the inevitable conclusion that the players are actually employees and bargain with them collectively to put a system in place that is fair to players and schools. Which in turn will allow the game to grow and become a healthier sporting institution.
In a future article I’ll have more to say about restructuring college football to make the on-field product better and make even more revenue. Stay tuned! In fact, hit that subscribe button to get future articles in your inbox. (It’s free!)
There would be a set of specifics that must be met for consideration like seats available, minimum number of hotel rooms in the area, etc. Sites would be chosen based on the best bid package with heavy consideration for the most money bid. By the way, weather should not be a priority consideration. If a cold weather city puts together the best offer, the CFP should accept it. We’re all about maximizing revenue, right? Well, don’t turn down more money, especially if it turned out to be significantly more money, just because of cold temps.