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3 reasons why proposed 12-team College Football Playoffs a change for the better
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3 reasons why proposed 12-team College Football Playoffs a change for the better
ATHENS — The College Football Playoffs are on the verge of changing, and it’s a change for the better.
Comments
I agree these are positives, but there’s an enormous, glaring negative, and that is this:
Instead of the do-or-die, winner-take-all, epic matchups that the Kick Six game, 2006 Ohio State-Michigan, and 2008, 2009, and 2012 SEC Championship games were (as well as countless others over the years) they would have been games that determined playoff seeding and little else.
The SEC Championship game, specifically, will suffer a loss of prestige and importance, especially in seasons in which both participants will make the playoff whether they win or lose.
Is a bye desirable? Sure, I guess. But as a Georgia fan, please don’t try to convince me that winning the SEC is a worthwhile consolation when you lose in the playoff to another team from the conference.
Been there, done that. Winning the SEC in 2017 was awesome. But I don’t brag about it much.
It should be 8. This will really hurt the regular season.
Class of 98 is right: "The SEC Championship game, specifically, will suffer a loss of prestige and importance, especially in seasons in which both participants will make the playoff whether they win or lose." I think you could have a lot of three-loss teams vying as well. More reveneue. more games, more excitement seems to be the Committee's goal.. That is good. I call it : "keeping football alive." Extending the football season. UGA would certainly benefit. More schools, ,more inclusion. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Meanwhile, UGA has Clemson coming up......we must remember our priorities.
While your assessment is accurate in the present, the success of the current format begs for expansion. When baseball first expanded with the three game playoff, traditionalist, myself included, cried, "There goes all meaning to the season."
How not hip we were. Don't like it....like the three point shot...but I'm gonna love it.
In response to the article's 3 points:
1. Griffith opens with the claim that the playoff expansion will generate more interest, then proceeds to make the exact opposite argument, outlining how the 12-team format will essentially destroy any remaining interest in the bowl season. Yes, obviously, people will be interested in the playoff. That's never been in dispute. But by Griffith's own argument, it will cannibalize the rest of what used to be bowl season. The sad thing is, it doesn't have to be that way. When two teams were selected to play for the national championship, nobody was saying the Sugar Bowl, Rose Bowl, et al were meaningless. But add two more teams to the national title picture and suddenly that's the case? It is an utterly arbitrary complaint that has been generated with the advent of the playoff, and this expansion will only exacerbate it. And just to be clear, I'm not disputing that bowl season is in need of renovation. Clearly it is. The point is that the bigger the playoff is, the less people care about the rest of the bowl season, to the point that we can reasonably assume it will not survive a 12-team playoff. Hard to see how this could be argued as generating an overall increase in interest when it's spurring the mentality that so much of the sport should be tossed aside.
I'm running out of time, so these next two will be brief (you're all welcome).
2. I actually agree with this point, more or less. The less regional the sport is, the better off it will be. I disagree, though, that including more teams will be good for the regular season. There was always a bubble, this expansion just relocates it and overall waters down the regular season in the process by making every win and loss mean less.
3. I've never felt that the solution to G5 inclusion was to act like those teams belong on this stage. Yes, if you go undefeated then you should be allowed to play for a championship. So why not have a G5 championship (and they can dress it up with whatever title they like)? That's always seemed to me like the obvious solution, but here we are. I mean, if you're going to argue fairness, how is it fair to decide in advance that certain teams should have an easier path to the playoffs than others? So much for demanding a strong schedule, another argument that I've never really bought - but hey look at that, out of time.
Any expansion is going to hurt the existing bowl setup. I think expansion is absolutely necessary (12 or 16 teams) in order to keep the stars (early round draft choices) of college football playing through the championship game.
Using some of the higher tiered bowls as playoff games is smart, because it will allow those bowls to become, once again, more relevant than they are now (by a long shot). Bowl season - as it stands currently - is mostly a waste of time and money. Having 30+ bowl (50%+ irrelevant games), inviting mediocre teams that barely have a winning record (or maybe not), and having more and more players opt-out of the games just goes to show how watered-down the bowl season is already.
My vote was for an 8-team playoff, but I do now see the reasoning behind going to 12-teams. Personally, I think there SHOULD be a "study period" this summer to allow more feedback from more important stakeholders before any final decision is made. The biggest thing I hope for is that they agree to start the expanded playoffs in 2023 and not wait until the ESPN contract runs out in 2025-26.
I think the 12 team play-offs will be an improvement. The article covered the positives very well.
I would add, it was getting stale with Ohio State and Clemson getting in virtually every year partly because of their lack of conference strength. It was becoming way too predictable.
Any expansion of the CFP should eliminate the Conference Championship games. The best solution for this is to expand the CFP to 16 teams with each P5 conference getting automatic slots for their top 2 teams, as determined by each conference, and then each P5 conference would host a 1st round CFP game between their #1 and another P5 conferences #2. This would expand the regional interest of the conference championships to national interest so that the P5 conferences would not lose money from the loss of their championship game. The G5 conferences would get 3 automatic slots for these conferences to award to deserving "G5 Champions." G5 conferences with selected teams would also host 1st round games instead of conference championships and these games would be against 3 at-large teams chosen by the CFP Committee from the highest ranking remaining teams. There you go 1st round done, no added games and some unbelievable match-ups. Just a couple of years ago this CFP format would have had at-large Alabama traveling down to play an undefeated UCF team to get through to the 2nd round. There are plenty of early bowl games that could be rotated through as 2nd round sites and then the current format for the semi-finals and finals can continue as currently scheduled. Eliminating the conference championships results in a 16 team CFP format only increasing by 1 game for 4 teams over the current format.