Michael Wilbon rips ‘loathsome’ SEC, Big Ten plan for College Football Playoff

We can count Pardon the Interruption’s Michael Wilbon among those opposed to the College Football Playoff changes proposed by the sport’s preeminent conferences, the SEC and Big Ten.

During Wednesday’s PTI, Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser discussed the idea, which would lead to both more overall spots in the CFP and more guaranteed spots for SEC and Big Ten teams.

Wilbon, while acknowledging his own connection to a Big Ten as a trustee (and alum) of Northwestern, was highly critical of the idea.

“It leads toward the ruination of what I appreciate about college football,” he said. “Having followed it all my life — having covered it half my life, I hate what this is doing. And yes, I’m a trustee of a university in one of those conferences that is at the big kid table. OK? It’s a golden child table to be in the Big Ten or the SEC. And I’m grateful for that. But now I’m sure I’m gonna make people who deal with me in the Big Ten cringe.”

Wilbon then addressed specifically what he doesn’t like. In his eyes, this proposal practices exclusion of not just certain teams and conferences, but long-held rivalries and traditions.

“Tony, I don’t like exclusion when it comes to sport. I want inclusion. And when you cut out fanbases, you cut out regions of the country — not just conferences because you can absorb those teams under another umbrella, I get that. USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon can be in the Big Ten and you sort of don’t exclude. But you do exclude, you exclude rivalries. You eliminate them. You eliminate, you chop down — when you do this — a big part of what college football really is. And I find it loathsome. So I’m not gonna deal with whether it’s deserved. I don’t know. It just, it distracts, in a major way, from college football to me.”

Not everyone is going to value the rivalries and other long-held traditions that Wilbon spoke of in the same way that he does. That said, his overall point is correct. College Football has undergone massive changes in recent years. Some significant changes can go as far back as the Bowl Championship Series in 1998, which (at least in some years) ignored long-held Conference/Bowl Game tie-ins. Certainly, the addition of the College Football Playoff in 2014, its expansion in 2024 and some of the realignment that took place in the intervening years only further changed the sport’s landscape.

Of course, if one doesn’t value those things in the same way that Wilbon does, the changes are all good. But it’s at least easy to see where he’s coming from.