Saturdays in the fall are fully booked in my calendar. From the moment I wake up, 8:50 in the morning to catch the end of College Gameday, to the last moments of my night, usually catching the end of the late West Coast game, I breathe, sleep and eat college football. And when the confetti has been swept away following the national championship game in mid-January, I begin the countdown until Labor Day when it starts all over again.
I do this because I truly love college football.
But I don’t love the bowl season. I don’t love waking up on a Saturday in late December just to realize that there are only six games on that day to enjoy. I don’t love the national championship and I certainly don’t love the College Football Playoff.
It makes no sense at first, I know. But let me explain.
The postseason has never been college football’s one shining moment. In that sense it is not like college basketball, the NBA or even MLB. Those are sports where the postseason rules supreme.
College football is the polar opposite. College football is a regular season sport. That’s right, the regular season is the best part of college football. College football is built on the Saturdays in the fall when you wake up and can watch 30 games a day and a couple of competitive ranked matchups at any given moment.
Expanding the playoff takes away from what makes college football special. College football has never been and never will be a postseason sport. It is a sport without parity. A sport in which it is easy to tell from the early weeks the three or four teams contending to win it all.
What makes college football special is Labor Day weekend when Ohio State takes on Notre Dame at the Horseshoe in Columbus with the winner propelled directly into the title conversation, and the loser quickly falling out of the playoff conversation before the season even gets its feet underneath it. Before Ohio State and Notre Dame kick off, Georgia and Oregon battle in a matchup of top-15 teams. Once again, the winner rides the momentum forward into Week 2 while the loser quickly needs to regroup if it has any hope of preserving a special season.
College football is made special by the first weekend in November when No. 3 Alabama hosts No. 2 LSU in front of a raucous crowd. The winner has the clear path to the SEC title game and, from there, the College Football Playoff. The loser has no guarantees and needs help from across the sport to have a glimmer of hope to make the playoff. Later that afternoon, college football’s Cinderella story, undefeated Minnesota, faces undefeated Penn State with both sides needing a win if they want a legitimate chance to play in a New Year’s Six bowl game, much less the playoff.
And conference championship week makes college football special with a Friday night, top-10 matchup between Oregon and Utah in the Pac-12 title game. Winner heads to the playoff while the loser settles for the Fiesta Bowl. The next day, Georgia faces Auburn with the same stakes. It is a must win weekend for almost every team in action if they hope to keep their playoff or NY6 hopes alive.
By expanding the playoff, you take all that away. When the decision is made to go from four teams to eight or 12, all that vanishes. Those games may take place but the implications will no longer be the same. Notre Dame vs. Ohio State and Alabama vs. LSU are no longer pseudo-elimination games.
Instead of heading to a NY6 game, Penn State or Minnesota would end up as the No. 10 seed in the playoff and watch their season end in a crushing loss instead of an exciting victory at the Rose Bowl.
And conference championship weekend would mean almost nothing to most of the top teams around the country because even with a loss, they will still make the playoff. In fact, some teams would choose to rest their stars knowing that nothing is at stake, but an injury to their quarterback would derail any chance of a title.
Those are the implications of expanding the playoff.
Why would you take away the most crucial part of something special? That would be like taking the majority of the lines in “SpongeBob SquarePants” away from Spongebob. It seems dramatic, even ridiculous, to make that comparison, but why is it? The regular season powers college football like SpongeBob does the show. It would be a baffling decision to take either away or even lessen their importance.
The regular season is everything in college football. Those are the games with passion, on college campuses with near 100,000 people in the seats living and dying on every play. The regular season is when we see the intense rivalries that create bragging rights for the next 12 months. And the college football regular season is the only regular season in which every game matters.
Ultimately, the CFP will expand — if not now, then likely in the next few years because, as we have seen from the continuous transformation of college athletics through conference realignment, this industry knows how to do one thing — follow the money. The money paves the path to more playoff games because more inventory equals more cash.
Those making the decision will argue that adding teams to the playoff will increase competitive balance … it won’t. Alabama, Georgia and Ohio State will continue to dominate the sport on the field, year in and year out. The opportunity to make the playoff does not increase the chances for teams that are in the tier below the giants to win a title. Those teams added to the playoff will lose in the postseason just like they did when they faced those top ranked squads in the regular season.
Athletic directors and conference commissioners will try and convince you that it will make the playoff more exciting. That line of thinking is true to an extent because a matchup between the No. 8 and No. 9 seeds will often be intriguing, but all they are playing for is the opportunity to get drubbed by the No. 1 seed a week later. That one extra game takes the excitement away from a plethora of games in the regular season.
The truth is that expanding the playoff has one benefit: It lines the pockets of those in power. And while that happens in almost every industry, why should it have to come at the cost of the product we all love?
The college football regular season is special. So for the love of the sport, please — don’t take it from us.