SALT LAKE CITY — Larry Scott, the Pac-12 Conference commissioner, has proposed the expansion of the college football playoff from four teams to eight as a way to address the many inequities of the 2020 pandemic season (varying number of games, lack of nonconference games, late starts, etc). It makes perfect sense.
Which is why the CFP rejected it out of hand. You can’t have common sense in college football, the worst-run sports entity in the country.
This raises many points, so let’s get to it.
Scott became the first commissioner from a Power Five conference to make such a suggestion, but it’s long overdue. Scott said that because of the problems caused by the pandemic “ … I felt it was our responsibility and important to consider an expanded playoff that would include more teams and automatic qualifiers who are conference champions this year.”
Well, this wasn’t as altruistic as Scott states it (“his responsibility”). The Pac-12 has produced the fewest qualifiers in the six-year history of the playoffs among Power Five conferences, having secured just two of the 24 berths, less than half of any other conference. The league has been skunked the last three years. The expansion of the playoffs would increase the odds of the Pac-12 slipping one past the goalie.
But Scott isn’t wrong. The playoffs need to be expanded, whether there’s a pandemic to navigate or not. Four teams is not enough, period.
But Bill Hancock, the flackman for the CFP, said no dice, telling ESPN, “They decided that doing that now would be such a significant change, and come with so many challenges, especially given the timing with the season already underway, that they concluded that the best outcome would be to make no changes in the format.”
Right. The Pac-12 and Big Ten conferences can throw together a season from scratch in a month — while play is already underway in other conferences — and the CFP can’t expand the playoff in almost three months. Four plus four is eight. Done. It’s not as if they have to plan a moon launch or discover a cure for the coronavirus.
For years Hancock and the gang have ignored all suggestions that the playoff should be expanded. But, after all, these are the same people who thought a playoff was impossible even though every sports organization in the world was employing one.
It was Hancock who once said, “We believe the bowl system wouldn’t survive a playoff.” And: “College football has the best regular season of any sport, and the lack of a playoff is one big reason why.” Then, after the playoff was created, he suddenly saw the light and said, “We think the new playoff will be the most dynamic improvement to college football in a generation … The event is very simple — the top four teams will play in a semifinal … Let’s settle it on the field once and for all.”
As if we didn’t understand the concept and it was all new to us.
So it’s not surprising that the CFP and its spokesman have been glacially slow to come around to the need of an expanded playoff.
The need for an expanded playoff is obvious to everyone but the CFP. Let’s start with this reason: Half of the 130 schools are shut out of the playoff. These are the schools that don’t belong to a Power Five conference.
Out of the 24 berths in the six-year history of the CFP, all but one has been filled by Power Five schools, the exception being, ahem, Notre Dame, which in reality is a floating Power Five school. They don’t even get the consolation prize. Out of the 36 berths in the New Year’s Six — the bowl games played on New Year’s day — only five have been filled by non-Power Five schools.
Every year there is a deserving team from the Group of Five (non-Power Five leagues) that gets left out of the playoff. For that matter, there are deserving Power Five schools that get left out, as well. An eight-team playoff would almost always ensure from year to year that all deserving schools were given the opportunity to compete for the national championship.
‘Whether it’s six or eight, at some point in time it (the CFP expansion) is going to happen,” Stanford coach David Shaw told ESPN. “We all know it; we all believe it. We’re just going to do it very, very slowly and methodically, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.”