Another year, another Alabama championship. Wait, no that’s not right. On January 7, 2019, the Clemson Tigers defeated the Alabama Crimson Tide 44-16, but you had to think about it for a second, didn’t you? The predictability of the College Football Playoffs, which just completed their fifth championship, has dragged ratings down and begun to raise questions of fairness. Even for those that are willing to recognize that Alabama and Clemson are simply better programs, we can all agree that rooting for an underdog is a hallmark of sports. These problems could be solved by expanding the playoff field, and an expansion would in turn benefit everyone involved in college football.
[Note: Some might ask why we care about extending the lifespan of football when is glorifies violence, exploits the working poor, and, at the college level, is practically indentured servitude. Sports, and football in particular, are an undeniable staple in our society, and the entertainment value and cultural heft of sports extend well beyond a dollar amount. Additionally, college football programs often buoy a school’s other athletic teams, which offer scholarships for students that will not become professional athletes (and are not suffering traumatic brain injuries). No matter how much some may hate it, the success of a school’s football program can also impact its enrollment. That’s right, high school students are turning down the chance at a top ten education from the Universities of Michigan and Florida because their football teams have been struggling. Let’s get back to the College Football Playoffs before we stray too far.]
There is precedent for changing the way a college football champion is crowned. According to the NCAA, the first college football champion was awarded in 1869, and the title was shared between Princeton and Rutgers. You might be surprised (if you are young enough) that a championship title could be shared, but for 127 years, the college football champion was selected with one or more polls. This created some interesting situations. For example, in 1871, no team was selected, and in the 1990’s, there were three instances of the final polls choosing different teams. Bowl games had already been introduced, and the Bowls had generally worked together to designate one of the games a national championship. This system wasn’t completely formalized until the 1998 Bowl Championship Series. The BCS was designed to put the top two teams, as determined by human polls and computer generated statistics, into an official National Championship game. For 16 years, this system should have resolved the issues of only using a poll vote. Except it didn’t. In most years, there was some controversy either about the third ranked team being more deserving or a team being left out of the other prestigious Bowl Games. Because the Southeastern Conference (SEC) was so dominant, a prime example of BCS controversy is the 2012 National Championship in which one-loss Alabama defeated the previously undefeated SEC Champion LSU Tigers. Was it fair to include Alabama in the championship game over champions from other conferences, especially when their one loss was to LSU earlier in the season? For the 2014 season, the College Football Playoffs were instituted, and everyone hoped this would be the end of controversy. By allowing the top four teams, ranked by a committee, to compete in a bracket, the CFP was designed to include all the reasonable contenders for national champion. It seemed to work at first, but now the wheels are coming loose.
The College Football Playoffs saw an immediate boost over the BCS. ESPN had admitted that the ratings brought in by the final BCS National Championship were disappointing. Then the next year, the two semi-final games of the first CFP both outperformed the previous championship game, becoming ESPN’s highest rated non-championship games ever. With the number four ranked Ohio State going in to win the title, the first CFP looked like it proved itself right. Better ratings and an apparently fairer system, what could go wrong? The one thing that can ruin any sporting event: predictability. The thrill of live sports is that anything can happen, so there was no thrill when the subsequent four championship went to Alabama, Clemson, Alabama, and Clemson (with the two teams playing each other in three of the four final games). The ratings for the CFP have never exceeded those achieved in its first year. Additionally, the four-team playoffs have not gone without accusations of unfair rankings. With each of the Power Five conferences expecting a bid, someone is always going to be disappointed. At the end of the 2018 season, Alabama didn’t play in the SEC Championship, but it was still granted a bid. When Alabama went on to defeat Georgia in the National Championship game, it marked the second time in five years that Alabama won the National Championship without even playing for their conference title. If the CFP is repeating the same issues as the BCS, then why isn’t everyone clamoring to implement the most obvious solution? It’s possible that the people involved are worried that a bigger tournament just means bigger problems. The CFP should absolutely weigh and compare options thoughtfully before rushing into a new system.
If your main motivation for expansion is to make sure the University of Central Florida gets a fair shake, then you’re not thinking big enough. UCF might be the underdog darling of the internet, but there’s always going to be some random non-power conference team that pokes into the national conversation. Those schools are not the ones getting screwed by a small tournament. It’s the 12-1 conference champions getting left behind because two SEC teams are going. The BCS struggled because the difference between a number two and a number three team was too small to be undisputed, and the same holds true in the CFP era with number four and number five teams. If you think that there is enough daylight between a number eight and a number nine team to be uncontroversial, you are wrong. However, no one is going to waste time arguing about a sixteen and seventeen ranked team. A team ranked that low would never win a national championship, but they’d probably be grateful for the chance to be a part of the conversation and share the stage with an Alabama or Clemson. You might be thinking that sixteen to too low to go, or that there would be too much interference with the conference championship games. Giving high-ranked teams a bye into the second round of a ten or twelve team tournament would still raise fairness questions, and there is a way to make the conference championships work for an expanded tournament.
The key to a successful 16-team CFP tournament is to leverage existing infrastructure. This means that the CFP should use the Power Five conference championship games as a part of the first round of the playoffs. The CFP has made conference championships less important because you don’t have to win one to be in the top four, and if you lose one, you’re out. By stitching the Power Five conference games into the tournament, the conferences can keep doing everything they are doing and get the added benefit of raising the prestige of the game. In most years, the teams playing in the Power Five championships are in the top 16 anyway, and there are still six slots in the tournament for other teams, which could go to the highest ranking teams not in a conference championship. This is where UCF gets their chance, as well as teams like Florida or LSU that don’t play in their conference championship game but still go on to prestigious bowls. Speaking of existing infrastructure, college football still uses Bowl Games as a way to add honor to teams. This includes the introduction of the New Years Six. Two of these six games are the CFP semi-finals every year, and the other four are just high-profile games between top teams. Let’s take a look at what a sixteen team playoff would have looked like for the last two years based on Week 14 rankings which are released after the last week of the regular season (i.e., before the conference championship games):
[Note: I arranged the bracket based on the highest ranked team in each championship, and I filled the extra three games placing the higher ranked teams against their lower ranked counterparts.]
For the 2017 season, you can see that the 16-team system utilizing the Power Five conference championships works perfectly. No one from the top sixteen is left out, it includes two teams from non-power conferences (UCF and Notre Dame), and it includes high ranked teams left out of their conference championships (Alabama and Penn State). For the 2018 season, the system breaks down a little bit because it gives a berth to teams outside of the top sixteen, including an unranked team. However, with the extra six non-conference championship teams, most other deserving teams still get a chance. The only ones left out are #13 Washington State, #15 Kentucky, and #16 West Virginia. Ultimately, unless you went to one of those schools, you’re probably not going to care about teams ranked that low. For both years there are some really interesting match-ups that could have drawn huge attendance and ratings, not to mention the pairings we might have seen down the line.
Using the existing bowls games would certainly work, but the question of scheduling still remains. The example above uses the New Years Six Bowl Games, which can be rotated to host the different rounds as they do now. This expansion also gives the opportunity for three new bowl games to become money making machines. To the point of scheduling, though, you can’t play two playoff rounds on back to back days. Assuming that the NCAA wants to keep the asinine schedule of waiting a month in between the conference championships and the first round of the CFP, this expanded can work with that.
There are two ways about it: 1) keep the first round on the first weekend in December and put the second round in the second weekend (when the Army/Navy game is), or 2) make the first round over Thanksgiving weekend and lose on game off the beginning of the season.
Option 1 works because it doesn’t mess with the regular season, and non-power teams can still play in a conference championship if they want (think UCF’s exciting defeat of Memphis last year). For critics concerned about the athletes playing more games, the only thing to say is sorry. There’s no way around it. An expanded playoff is always going to mean more games for some players. The semi-final round would then be played on New Year’s Day as usual, which still allows for the first Monday of January to serve as Championship Day. The question with this option is if the second week in December is still viable for big ticket games.
Option 2 makes more sense if the NCAA doesn’t want to put the season too far into December. This would eliminate one game off the beginning of the season. This isn’t much of a loss, though, because teams always play easy non-conference games at the start. They don’t have much value (except to the small schools that get paid big bucks to get stomped on the road). If it’s really necessary, the season could start a week earlier, and/or change those first games to exhibitions (the small schools still get paid, the good teams still get the practice, and it’s lower stakes for ratings, attendance, and performance). The key here is utilizing Thanksgiving weekend for the first round. This allows for the games to be staggered over the weekend instead of overlapping each other all on one day. This option could mitigate the extra playing, but it does make non-power conference championships less likely to happen or be important. The semi-final round would then be played on New Year’s Day as usual, which still allows for the first Monday of January to serve as Championship Day.
The CFP shouldn’t be afraid of expanding the tournament. Sports fans love to watch the underdog make a surprise run, or an unexpected pairing (that #8 UCF and #9 Florida match-up from the example 2018 expansion would have been a real treat for fans). Whether it’s the NCAA, ESPN, or the CFP Committee, everyone has a vested interest in boosting ratings as well as actual excitement for the college football national championship. A full 16-team tournament would genuinely be exciting, and honestly, an 8-team expansion would just feel half-baked. The more teams that are included, the less likely it is that there will be a big scandal about someone not getting a fair shake. The CFP should take bold strokes to improve the playoff, and the existing bowl and conference championship games provide more than enough of a foundation for an exciting 16-team tournament.
James K. O'Connell 