You’d be forgiven for not keeping up with every report filed recently about upcoming changes to the College Football Playoff. The sport’s postseason has undergone so many alterations that it’s understandable one would start to tune them out. Especially so now, when it seems like every other week a conference commissioner comes up with a new idea or a new format that solves everything (it never does).
But now, the format that is purportedly the leader in the clubhouse is so patently absurd, one of the nation’s top college football writers is sounding the alarm.
On Sunday, The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel penned a column about the completely “nonsensical” proposed format spearheaded by Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and tacitly approved by his Power-2 counterpart Greg Sankey of the SEC. Under Petitti’s proposed playoff, 16 teams will compete, up from the current 12-team playoff that just began last season. The new format, however, provides 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 team, and three at-large selections made by a committee.
Mandel suggests that this arrangement is completely against the spirit of college football and would make regular season games (especially of the non-conference variety) feel worthless as more than 80% of playoff spots are already accounted for.
“No major U.S. sport holds a postseason where certain divisions or conferences are guaranteed more berths than the others,” Mandel writes. “The hubris of the Big Ten and SEC to even propose this, much less go forward with it, is astonishing even by Big Ten and SEC standards.
“Those conferences will justify their rationale by citing historical data that says their current members would have averaged even more than four bids annually. They’re not wrong about that. Which is why putting it in writing is unnecessary.”
But even worse, in Mandel’s mind, than the move to a 16-team format with 13 auto-bids is how the postseason would be structured. Under Petitti’s proposal, the 16-team playoff would not be a symmetrical bracket. Teams seeded 13 to 16 would effectively compete in “play-in games” on the weekend typically reserved for the Army-Navy game. The next weekend, six more games would be contested with the three through 12-seeds playing, along with the two teams to make it out of the “play-in” round. Winners from those games would move onto the quarterfinal round when, finally, the one and two-seeded teams play their first game on New Year’s.
Pretty straightforward, right?
Obviously not. But of course, this format could help generate the one thing everyone in college football wants more of: money.
Sure, the added inventory from expanding the playoff by four teams can generate some more revenue, but that’s just the start of it. The real motivation behind these changes is to restructure conference championship weekend.
See, with the four automatic berths granted to the Big Ten and SEC under the proposed format, those conferences would be at liberty to determine their four teams however they see fit. And those familiar with Petitti’s thinking have reported that the Big Ten would like to use conference championship weekend as a play-in to the College Football Playoff, a move that would create yet more game inventory to sell to television partners.
In this hypothetical, the top-two finishers in the Big Ten would play for a conference title as usual. But teams three through six would also compete that weekend. No. 3 would face No. 6, and No. 4 would play No. 5, with the winners advancing to the College Football Playoff via the conference’s auto-bid.
“Nearly everyone The Athletic has spoken to about this subject over the past few months says this entire cockamamie scheme is the brainchild of Tony Petitti,” Mandel reports, adding that the commissioner “must have reason to believe Fox, CBS, NBC or perhaps one of the umpteen streaming services will pay good money for the rights to these showdowns.”
Of course, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that, if the Big Ten decided to do this, the SEC would likely follow suit.
The ACC and Big 12, with their two bids each, could be impacted too. Under the proposed format, those conference’s championship games would be rendered meaningless, other than for pride and seeding purposes. As such, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips has already considered giving the conference’s regular season champion one auto-bid into the College Football Playoff, while having the No. 2 and No. 3 teams battle it out on conference championship weekend for the second automatic berth.
Nobody is asking for this. Least of all, diehard college football fans.
“I can’t emphasize enough how much damage a predetermined, nonsensical bracket will cause for not just the CFP’s credibility, but college football’s popularity,” Mandel concludes. “It will not bring in new fans and it will turn off many current ones. Not to mention, it will likely incur scrutiny from politicians and antitrust lawyers alarmed to see two conferences colluding to rig a national tournament in their favor.”
Again, nobody is asking for this. But this is what happens when Petitti, a longtime television executive, is calling the shots and teams, who now have to find money to pay players, are desperate for cash.
The product will suffer in the name of a few more dollars. And for a sport as steeped in tradition as college football, that’s a shame.