We're Going To Need A Bigger Playoff
College football may be dropping traditions left and right but one will always remain: Bill Hancock being trotted out to endorse a reconfiguration of college football he'd spent years decrying.
“This proposal at its heart was created to provide more participation for more players and more schools,” CFP executive director Bill Hancock said. “In a nutshell, that is the working group’s message: more participation.”
We may not get Texas-Texas A&M or Oklahoma-Nebraska anymore, but we'll always have the greatest rivalry: Hancock now vs Hancock five minutes ago.
Anyway, the reconfiguration in bullet points:
- 12-team field.
- The 6 highest-ranked conference champions get automatic bids.
- The 6 highest-ranked non-champions get at-large bids.
- The top four conference champions get byes.
- The first round is at home sites. Quarters, semis, and the final are at bowl sites.
- There is no re-seeding to avoid rematches or intraconference matchups.
To the takes machine!
[After THE JUMP: maybe talk to Bob Homegames next time]
Twelve is the right number. Any playoff expansion was going to come with a Group of Five bid. Expanding to eight functionally adds in the Pac-12 champ, a G5 team, the second-best SEC team, and then a single wildcard (which could easily be another SEC team). That doesn't do much to solve the problem that CFB currently has where the whole point of the season is the playoff and the vast majority of college football knows it has a 0% chance of making it in.
Sixteen, meanwhile, is too big. We have a local example of why. The final playoff rankings that year featured Michigan at #14 and Notre Dame at #15. The 2019 Michigan team is the one that lost 35-14 to Wisconsin and 56-27 to OSU. They also lost a game to PSU. Their main accomplishments were that grim 10-3 win over Iowa and a random firebombing of, yep, Notre Dame. The idea that Michigan team—which went 2-3 against ranked teams and was largely uncompetitive in two of those games—would make it in rankles. And ND would slide in right behind them.
Matt Hinton has pointed out that these sorts of analyses assume that the CFP committee rankings, meaningless past #4, are well thought-out…
Two things about retrofitting the 12-team format to past seasons: 1) 2020 was in no way a representative season for anyone, especially not for the Pac-12, and 2) Committee rankings beyond the top 4 in any given season might have been very different if they'd actually mattered
— Matt Hinton (@MattRHinton) June 10, 2021
…but it's not like there are appealing options past 15 most years that might get elevated. The 2019 options just outside a hypothetical 16 team playoff are Iowa and Minnesota.
Twelve excludes teams that had almost universally bleh seasons, aside from the occasional one-loss G5 team that doesn't have a marquee win. It also preserves some of the urgency of the regular season by dangling the carrot of a bye in front of teams.
Why is this happening? Obvious:
…here’s the bottom line: 44 programs would’ve reached the College Football Playoff at least once over a 10-year period. And that’s why they’re expanding.
“One of the things we were responding to was the concentration that’s occurred: 78.5 percent of all the opportunities in the first seven years have gone to five teams,” Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said Thursday.
Michigan's part in this is minor and rather said, but they land home games in 2016 (#6, playing Florida State) and 2018 (#7, playing #10 Florida*). At least we're not Texas, which didn't make the field once in this thought exercise.
*[You can change college football into a 30-on-30 game played only on moons of Saturn and Michigan will be handed a matchup with Florida.]
The format can get weird. This is mostly an Alabama problem, because when Alabama doesn't win the SEC they generally get dropped to the #5 slot, causing the #4 team to swear extensively at the prospect of getting the Tide at a neutral site a week after they kicked a G5 team's face in. This is most notable in 2017, when Alabama got dropped out of the SEC title game by an Iron Bowl loss. They made the CFP anyway and won the title win wins over Clemson and Georgia; in this format they get dropped to #5, facing UCF and then Ohio State.
Finally, Notre Dame gets boned. After years of skating along as a coddled independent handed exceptions, this plan would ban Notre Dame (and other independents) from byes. Jack Swarbrick is salty:
When asked about not having a bye, ND AD Jack Swarbrick said "I look forward to never hearing again about how we played one less game or don't have a conference championship."
— Heather Dinich (@CFBHeather) June 10, 2021
I plan on bringing that up constantly anyway.
What is with these guys and bowl games? This edition of the playoff has at least four too many games played at antiseptic neutral sites potentially many thousands of miles away from participants. It has a bizarre feature: teams ranked 5-8 get home playoff games. Teams ranked 1-4 do not. Fans of teams that make the championship game are looking at three different trips in short order. This is much less of a deal when you live near some of these sites, which is another advantage handed to a conference that really does not need one.
I don't know why the guys at the top of this sport keep letting third-party bowls horn in and grab some of the money so their championship can be worse. I mean, I do: this is a mid-contract reconfiguration and they have to get buy in from the people who run the New Year's Six:
As long as the playoff is operating under the current contract, it has to honor its agreements with the New Year's Six Bowls, unless everyone involved in those contracts agrees to change them.
It is possible that there is an underlying desire to have more home games but that can't happen until 2026-27, so they're going to trot out Hancock to talk about their treasured relationship with these bowls while they prepare a knife in the back.
On the other hand, maybe not:
"I'm not sure playing in East Lansing, Michigan on Jan. 7 is a really good idea." - Bob Bowlsby said, in response to a @DanWetzel question about why using the bowl. (It would probably be a good idea for Michigan State!)
— Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) June 10, 2021
That's nonsense, obviously, since the format currently allows for a northern home game one whole week before Bowlsby's horror scenario. But maybe there's still a majority in favor of the geographical slant away from the Big Ten even after the contract expires.
I need a better explanation for why 16 teams is "too big" than "well, the 15th ranked team isn't very good compared to the top 4 teams". Really? How good is the 64th ranked team in March Madness? But March Madness is awesome! The point of a playoff is not to scientifically determine which team had the "best" or "most deserving" regular season. It's to have an exciting tournament. And I submit that, while the 16th ranked team will only rarely knock off, or even give a scare to, the #1 team, that will still be enough to make for an exciting tournament.
But my biggest issue is that a bye is way too big a reward for being the 4th ranked team instead of the 5th or 6th ranked team. That really is a pure beauty contest, and an extra week off is a huge advantage. Let the 1st-4th teams get beat up along with everyone else in the first round and the remaining rounds will be more exciting.
On the last point (I'm ambivalent on the first), it's not entirely a beauty contest, as those byes are reserved for conference champions. The way they protected conference champions with byes is actually my favorite bit about this (and not only because it screws ND). It goes a significant way in maintaining winning a conference as a significant accomplishment.
There will likely be situations where there's controversy over the 4th or 5th best conference champion, but that's a better controversy than the pure beauty contest aspects of allowing a team that didn't win it's conference to have a bye
I'm fine with giving some reward to conference champions. But your last paragraph, is to me, my whole point - ranking the conference champions is always a crapshoot and gets into received wisdom about which conference was "stronger" that year, a topic on which there is usually no data except for a random spattering of early-season games that only rarely involve contests between teams likely to make the playoffs.
I don't see why anyone should get a bye. Play the games!
It may be a crapshoot, but it's a crapshoot more true to the historical ethos of college football, in which winning your conference was the key goal, than the "these are the 3 SEC teams that deserve byes" arguments that would likely result from champions not being protected.
Now, 16 teams obviously resolves that problem, but if they are choosing a 12 team playoff, I'm glad they gave conference champions some benefit rather than just going with the system that existed with 4 teams.
Yeah, if you go back and look at the #10-16 teams most years they all sort of look alike. They're either pretty good P5 teams or really good G5 teams, but virtually all have some flaws that justify them being outside single digits. Is 9-3 Okie St. with a win over 9-3 Baylor demonstrably different than 9-3 PSU with a win over 10-2 Wisconsin? Probably not, and yet one of them gets the chance to play for a title (as unlikely as that is to occur) and the other sits. And yes, you can keep this argument going all the way down, but those top 4 teams getting a bye is a huge benefit that feels especially unearned for the #4 team compared to the #5. I'd rather they all have to play someone and if Alabama gets to curb-stomp a pretty good P5 team in the process then that's okay.
I would simply reply that football isn't hoops, so the #64 (or #16) team playing #1 wouldn't be "awesome" - and as evidence sumbit the most recent CFP, where Bama only had to face #4 & #3 and still won both by ~30!
So I don't need to see them play #16. Just sayin
Right. There's no reason to think the football playoffs should be just like the basketball playoffs. I'm for keeping the field as small while still making it work. I still prefer 8. Brian complains about the SEC could get 3 teams in there, but they technically could get 7 teams in with this format. And someone pointed out a few years ago they would have gotten 5 or 6 based on the last rankings.
Also, from some I've heard, this preserves the top 4 getting an extra benefit. But who cares!? The playoff is new. This isn't some tradition that needs to be maintained.
I agree with you Gulo37, 8 is enough.
But the $EC commish said he'd block an 8-team playoff because while they "could" have multiple (3+) teams in it, he felt realistically the committee seeding the 8 teams wouldn't take more than 2.
Maybe 3 in that exceptional year (Auburn or Lsu face UGa in $EC title gm, Bama gets in as 3rd team).
With 12 he feels certain $EC gets 3 minimum every year.
I don't know what the idea format is but yes, please expand past four teams. The status quo sucks.
I do think they should get rid of conference title games. You can't make the season go on too long. Cut the regular season back down to 11 games and go straight from the season to the playoff.
If you eliminate the conference title game, who gets the auto bye between 11-1 osu with a loss at psu, or 11-1 wiscy with a loss at Michigan?
Extrapolate that to Bama-Uga, Oregon-Usc or any other potential conference tie that would benefit 1 team with a bye?
reasonably OK needs to happen...BUTT...shoulds be 16 teams no byes and reseeding to avoid rematches
This also puts check on ND and the SEC somewhat....Lets take baseball for ONE example...The SEC is great at self promotion they have coaches and media and Commisioners who do nothing but self promote and who tell us the SEC is the best conference in any sport .This year MANY were predicting that 6 teams would make the college world series..WHY?? because they are the best..so this becomes a self fullfilling prophesy in the rankings and RPI etc etc..So they get to host what?. 8 or 9 regionals ..Yeah playing at home is a HUGE advange they get because of this in Reality they have 2 and POSSIBLY a 3rd not the 6 or 7 predicited...You can take any sport pretty much and the SEC has that advantage..
This will help that go away
I'm not going to knock the 12-team seeding because I think expansion of the playoffs is good for everyone, but crapping on the 2019 UM team at #14 ignores that the #12 team is likely just as blah. In 2018 the #12 team was PSU, a team that lost to UM 42-7 and went 1-3 against ranked teams. In 2017 the #12 team was 12-0 UCF and #13 was 9-4 Stanford, while #12 in 2016 was 9-3 Okie St., a team that lost by 3 to 6-7 CMU and was 2-2 against ranked teams.
Outside of the top 8-ish teams you're going to have mediocre-ish "good" teams. I'm fine with the top 4 teams getting byes but we are going to run into the same issues where the #5 team may be just as good as the #4 team but gets screwed out of a break. At least with 16 teams everyone has to play the same number of games and you don't reward the same biased provincialism we see in rankings already.
Exactly. If you're going to worry about who "deserves" to have a chance to win the national championship, screw it and just go back to the pre BCS days. At least then the arguments are more fun.
If you're going to have a playoff, have a damn playoff, not a setup designed to give a smooth path for Alabama's coronation.
Yeah, it feels like it's a purposeful attempt by the committee to retain the media-fueled "debate" about the playoffs while still expanding it to make more money. But it would be just as useful in my eyes to have everyone play someone and you get "rewarded" for a good season by getting to play 9-3 Washington St. and not 10-2 Auburn or whatever. But giving Clemson and Alabama easier runs doesn't help anyone, especially teams like Oklahoma and Clemson who already play in weaker conferences and have easier runs to the playoffs.
Double post
Meh. I'm less concerned about 1-4 teams getting byes and weak 9-12 teams getting in. The top seeds bypass a game, but as was pointed out, they also don't get a home playoff game. I'm fine with it, even if a Florida team playing in the Orange Bowl, or an LA team playing in the Rose Bowl is functionally a home game.
Concerning the 9-12 teams, their function is to provide a worthy-ish opponent for the 5-8 teams' home playoff games. Call this the Oklahoma self-esteem prize. It gives a team with a good enough record for the top 8 a chance to advance in the playoffs, and in front of their fans. Speaking as an NFL fan, winning a playoff game even if you don't reach the Superbowl is satisfying. As Michigan fans, think how dismal our off seasons have been after routinely getting boat-raced and/or jobbed by the refs against OSU, and then losing (often as the favorite) in a Bowl game.
And the 9-12 teams? Their reward is a puncher's chance of advancing in the playoffs. The lamer their regular season, the greater difficulty in pulling the upset. Hey, every once in a while OSU forgets they have Ezekiel Elliot in a driving rainstorm. We Michigan fans have a major problem with who benefited (especially with our snake-bite record against those same Schmuckeyes), but in general this is a good thing.
Everyone is better off. Let's roll with it a few seasons until we discover the next reason to whine and bellyache.
I think this is a really good take and I agree with all of it.
I guess I don't see how missing a home game really matters to the top-4 teams because they get to skip the game completely; it's an automatic win and that's a bigger bonus than just getting home-field advantage. I mean, the ADs may hate missing out on the payday by from a practical perspective it's better for your chances to play one fewer game.
I just think we should have everyone play the same number of games. If you're Alabama or Clemson you get a mediocre first-round opponent and that's good for you but it at least requires you to play a game. And I do think the #4 team getting a week to rest up while the #5 team has to play someone who, by definition, is one of the top-12 teams in the country feels unfair.
It only really matters to the fans of the top-4 teams, who don't get to watch their historically excellent (or in the case of Alabama, absolutely normative) team play at their home stadia, which sucks but "fan service" hasn't been a priority in college football for 40 years.
One thing that didn't really get discussed - one team can play up to 17 games in a single season, which is on par with a literal NFL regular season worth of games. For a bunch of athletes who are supposedly students first.
Don't tell me the NCAA cares about its student athletes. They just want that sweet sweet cash to roll in baby.
As has been said a bajillion times, somehow this has never been an issue for the FCS, and there they don't even have the excuse of making lots of money on additional games.
Yep. It's also not an issue at the high school level.
For instance: in Texas, for high school teams playing in the championship game, the championship game occurs on the 16th weekend of the season. And that's in a schedule that 95% of the time includes no bye weeks! In Michigan, championship week is the 14th weekend. Similarly for many other states.
Ok, but “other people do it” has never been a good reason to do anything.
"Other people are doing exactly the same thing you claim to be impossible and it seems to be working out fine for them" is a perfectly good response to an ill-thought out "we can't possibly do that".
And in this case, it's not even "other people", it's the same people (the NCAA).
Do FCS teams have the same number of practice hours as FBS? Honestly asking. I'd guess it's the same.
Yes, it's the same.
Also ---- if we're being objective, it's likely that a North Dakota State or James Madison FCS player (picking the FCS schools most likely to be playing up to 17 games) is spending more time on academics than a elite school FBS player.
Even at those elite FCS schools, most players are considerably less likely to have a professional football career ahead of them.
E.g., even at those 17-game FCS schools, the athletes find time for the games, the practices, and their academic workloads.
One thing that didn't really get discussed - one team can play up to 17 games in a single season, which is on par with a literal NFL regular season worth of games. For a bunch of athletes who are supposedly students first.
Don't tell me the NCAA cares about its student athletes. They just want that sweet sweet cash to roll in baby.
One thing that needs to be discussed is double posts!
After many years of a four-team playoff that resulted in talent coalescing around a small handful of teams, it will be interesting to see if expanding to a 12-team format really affects that. For the first few years I suspect the current top teams will continue to win. Will appearing in the playoff help with recruiting, even if the lower-rated teams get beat fairly badly? Or will the top talent simply continue to coalesce around those teams that win the 12-team playoff every year?
I’m skeptical. They let this stupid thing go on so long that a top-3 team will beat the #5 team in the country by 30. I don’t know if it’s possible to un-ring that bell.
I like Notre Dame getting karma. And I like the idea of a southern school having to come up north in the cold.
But...college football has already been ruined in my eye with the uneven playing field of talent. Alabama still has 3rd stringers that could start at most schools. Expanding the playoff is fine in one sense but I still feel like it's just delaying the inevitable. They're too far ahead of everyone else with the kind of players they bring in and with Nick Saban recently signing a contract extension through 2028? Don't for one second believe that won't get them AT LEAST another 4 national titles between now and then.
Michigan disappointing me on the field year after year is already painful enough. But regardless of how we look, this is Alabama's world and we have to live in it, unfortunately.
I mean....you are pretty much correct, but I think with the expansion and NIL, it should help pull some talent elsewhere. Which wont hurt Bama at all, but I think you'll see blue chippers raise their hand at other campuses.
But like you said its Bama's college football world and everyone else is living in it. They will always have the bag and give two shits about any consequences, and until Saban hangs it up it will be a similar story until then. And that aint happening until at least 2028 now..and he will be 76 at that point.
Watch the NCAA finally deliver some slaps on the hands once Saban leaves. lol
There is absolutely an uneven playing field talent-wise. It's always like that though, and it will even out or at least shift over time. The NBA for example, always has just a few teams with a chance to win the Championship. If you aren't the Lakers, or Spurs, most recently the Warriors, or whatever team Lebron James is on, you probably aren't able to win. However, watching your team in the first or second round give it everything it's got is always exciting. I think the playoffs are going to breathe new life into the sport. Just knowing your team is there to put it all on the line, in opposed to your best starters sitting out, and the rest of the squad feeling disheartened is going to make this fun to watch!
This is good news for anyone not named Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State or Oklahoma. And frankly, I could make a case that even Oklahoma benefits from getting a playoff game they have a decent chance of winning.
The fact that ND got squeezed is merely a side benefit. Moreover, even they are better off with a substantially better chance of making the field, and ditto Oklahoma's decent chance of winning a playoff game.
Finally, color me SHOCKED that an NCAA committee actually put its finger on the real reason the current system is lacking. They call it participation; you could also call it the top-4 teams monopolize 5* who want to get to the playoffs. Same/same.
Reminds me of Churchill's one-liner about U.S. participation in the World Wars, "We know that we can count on the United States to do the right thing...eventually. After all other courses of action have been considered and found wanting."
The process of settling on the number of bowls is like another Churchill quote (about negotiations over the number of battleships): “The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight.”
Replace "admiralty" with "NCAA", "economists" with "schools", and "ships" with "bowls" and it sounds about right.
I haven't seen anything confirmed about this, but I assume that the quarter-finals matchups will be determined by "highest/lowest remaining seed" method rather than a straight bracket. ie, if the team ranked 12 upsets the team ranked 5, that team will then play the #1 ranked team, not the #4. In other words, the way the NFL playoffs work. Or are they setting up a bracket that they play through regardless of the ranking outcomes.
I don't know anything about Bob Bowlsby but fuck that dude. I'd love to see a Big 12 or SEC team come to the north and play in January.
That doesn't do much to solve the problem that CFB currently has where the whole point of the season is the playoff and the vast majority of college football knows it has a 0% chance of making it in.
This is really a fundamental shift from the way college football operated for most of its history, where the whole point of the season was to play football, and the "national championship" was just a goofy sideshow people argued about for fun.
Eventually people decided we had to crown a "real" national champion, and ever since then it's been nothing but whining about the format. I have little faith this proposal will put a stop to any of that.
Yeah I mean I think I supported going to the BCS, but I was also basically fine with the way things were. I kind of miss it. Lots of tradition upended. Do I enjoy games more or watch more or feel more engaged since 97? Definitely not.
I guess I never truly understand feelings such as this
That doesn't do much to solve the problem that CFB currently has where the whole point of the season is the playoff and the vast majority of college football knows it has a 0% chance of making it in
This is generally how NCAA basketball, hockey, softball, baseball, etc etc work. You play to make the tournament and at least in this new format, everyone kicks off game 1 with an actual path to the national championship unlike the previous 130+ years of college football
Secondly, agreed on the weirdness of not having home games for the quarters finals. Having 3 levels of neutral side pseudo-bowl games is weird. FCS teams host home games right up through the semifinals. FBS should do the same and not make this overly complicated (although making things overly complicated is perhaps the grandest tradition in all of college football)
I wonder how much the bowls are paying these NCAA and college administrators to keep their games. I'm pretty sure it makes zero financial sense unless the decision makers are getting paid by the bowls. The correct decision is to have schools host all the games, except the championship, which should get bid out every year.
Just for clarification, are they talking about expanding to 12 for this coming season, or is that starting in a few years?
Was Wetzel throwing shade at us ? Why would he say EL and not AA seems odd, as MSU won't be playing before we will.
The trick in this playoff scenario is figuring out how to acquire the number five seed.
I'd like to see conference champs seeded above all the at-larges, or at least have the conference champs be guaranteed a home game (if they don't get a bye). We want the regular season to mean something, right?
The B1G divisions, BCS, and playoffs have been the worst thing to happen to UM football pigeon holing it behind its chief rival whom it cannot get by, cannot pass go, cannot win...well anything. They still may not win any conference championships but a potential playoff bid alongside OSU in those years they are actually better than PSU and Wiscy (2016 & 2018) would go a long way to feeling more relevant and probably competing for a larger piece of the recruiting pie which will ultimately narrow the gap.
I’m not a fan of tournament byes especially in a game like football that has so much game attrition.
The extra time to get healthy and prep is too significant.
But hey if it fucks with Notre Dame.
All the more reason to have them, if we care even a little bit about the regular season and/or crowning a deserving champion instead of the lucky winner of a plinko tournament.
If all you care about is "crowning a deserving champion" then why have a playoff at all?
If you're going to have a playoff because you think you need to "prove it on the field" then why allow some teams to skip 25% of the "prove it" phase because the Coaches' Poll thinks the PAC12 is better than the Big 12 this year based on zero actual evidence?
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