Last week, College Football Playoff executives approved adopting a straight-seeding model, marking a significant change from the previous format, which awarded its four first-round byes to the highest-ranking conference champions.
The move came following the first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff, which was considered a success but received criticism over its seeding structure, which rewarded conference champions over schools ranked much higher.
That most recent shift was not unexpected, but many saw it as an effort to appease the SEC and Big Ten over smaller conferences.
Speaking of them, The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel penned a column on Sunday about the “nonsensical” proposed format spearheaded by Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and tacitly approved by SEC commish Greg Sankey. Petitti’s proposed playoff would expand to 16 teams and provide four automatic berths each to the Big Ten and SEC, two berths a piece for the ACC and Big 12, one auto-bid for a Group of 5 teams, and three at-large selections made by a committee. Mandel argued that such a setup would be against the spirit of college football and further devalue regular season games.
Mandel’s assessment doesn’t seem to hold much water for CBS Sports’ Josh Pate, who sees The Athletic college football senior columnist as one of many people championing this kind of expansion and doesn’t have the right to complain now that it could become a reality.
“There is an army deep and wide of people who supported expanding the playoff, who are looking at the result of an expanded playoff, and they’re terrified by it,” Pate began on Monday’s episode of The Josh Pate College Football Show, using several of Mandel’s X posts as examples. “I keep looking back at them, and I don’t think I should have to say anything. I keep waiting for the realization to slap them in the face that they were on the wrong side of this. They supported the wrong thing. And yet that moment never comes.”
One of the posts Pate showcases is Mandel’s response to an X user named Kevin Mitchell, who wrote, “Some of us told you, morons it would ruin the greatest sport on the planet, but you cheered it on enthusiastically.”
“…There was never a scenario where you expanded the playoff with the right people in charge. This wasn’t hard to see. I know that because I saw it then. We had differences of opinion on how it would impact the value of the regular season. We had all that. But what really at the core of my resistance to playoff expansion is I knew who would be in charge of it, and I knew what their motivation was, and their motivation was way different from your motivation.
“The Stewart Mandels of the world. Stewart never looked at this and said, ‘I want playoff expansion so that we can deepen the pockets of two major conferences at the expense of the literal rest of the country.’ But he advocated, as did many, for a step down a slippery slope that inevitably caused all of that. It was not hard to see coming.”
Mandel caught wind of the video and responded to Pate on Monday.
“While honored to be called a moron on Josh’s show, this completely ignores the effects of realignment since 2021, when the original 12-team CFP was devised,” wrote Mandel. “Greg Sankey was one of the 4 who devised the format, even though the SEC might have been better off staying at 4.”
Pate didn’t respond directly to Mandel but did respond to someone else’s response to him.
Both parties seemed to leave it there, though we will note that Mandel’s Athletic colleague Chris Vannini offered a rebuttal to another of Pate’s videos on Monday. In a post where the CBS Sports host pushes back on the idea that college football is “ruined,” Vannini quoted it by noting how certain former Pac-12 schools might disagree.
Honestly, it’s all a bit confusing. College football is a shell of its former self unless it’s not, and the game has been besmirched unless it hasn’t, and the CFP is ruined, except maybe it isn’t.
As far as we’re concerned, this kind of circular arguing about the state of college football lets us know that the game so many fans love is still alive and kicking.