USA TODAY International Edition
Expanded CFP field overdue
For well over a year, expansion of the College Football Playoff has felt inevitable. There was too much dissatisfaction with the system from too many of its constituents, too much lethargy around the same teams making it over and over, too little enthusiasm about even playing in bowl games from teams that missed out on the Playoff. Something had to change.
And as usual in college sports, it’s changing for the financial benefit of everyone but the players.
That’s not to say Thursday’s announcement from the CFP suggesting a 12- team playoff will be coming in the next few years is bad news. Far from it.
As the flaws of the four- team model have revealed themselves to us since its debut in 2014, playoff expansion not only makes sense but was pretty much an imperative to juice more interest in the sport. Given how stubbornly college football’s old guard held on to the BCS for years and years despite mounting evidence that they needed a playoff, the fact that it’s going to triple in size in less than a decade is nothing short of remarkable.
There’s a lot to like about that. We’re going to get real, guaranteed playoff access for at least one team from the Group of Five. We’re going to get firstround playoff games on campus. We’re going to have room for a team that loses a couple of games because its star
quarterback got injured but is clearly one of the best in the country at full strength. We’re going to have better non- conference games early in the season because losses aren’t going to be penalized as heavily by the selection committee.
This is progress for the sport. But as long as the players aren’t going to see a penny of the additional billions the additional playoff games will generate, it’s hard to see it as progress for the most essential people in the system.
As you wade through the details of what the CFP management committee will formally consider next week in Dallas, it’s clear that the strongest conferences got taken care of here because there will be additional spots – which means additional money – for the Southeastern and the Big Ten. There are easier access points for Group of Five teams, for Notre Dame, for the Pac- 12. Heck, they’ve even given a big sloppy kiss to their bowl game cronies here since the proposal includes bowls as host sites for quarterfinals and semifinals.
But the players? They’re getting a longer, more grueling season with no change in their slice of the pie. That’s College Sports Inc. for you, the same as it ever was.
“We were looking for ways to create opportunity but also be very mindful of what the impact of additional games would be,” said Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, who noted that most teams would not play more games in this system than they would have otherwise.
The argument from the conference commissioners making this decision will be that they’re doing exactly what the athletes want: Expanding the number of ways they have to compete for a national title.
Since the beginning of time, one of college football’s fundamental flaws was the idea that a team could win all of its games and be ineligible to play for a championship because they didn’t belong to the right conference or because poll voters didn’t think their competition was good enough. This new 12team system will pretty much eradicate that problem and provide every single player in the Football Bowl Subdivision a theoretical pathway for their team to win the title.
But fixing the system so that the Boise States or Central Floridas of the world won’t get left out does not mean it’s fair to the players.
Under the proposed system, the two teams that make the championship game will potentially have played a 12game regular season, a conference championship game and either three or four playoff games depending on whether they got a first- round bye. That’s a possible 17- game season for college football, a sport where the norm was 11 regular- season games and a bowl not that many years ago.
When the CFP began, it was easier to rationalize making two teams play one more game than they normally would. And still, coaches like Urban Meyer and Dabo Swinney talked extensively in those early years about how physically grueling it was for a team to play that extra game against a top- notch opponent. Now you’re asking them to play at least one more than that, which will likely require starting the season a week earlier and finishing in late January.
It’s a professional schedule without professional pay for the players. In fact, it’s no pay at all since the conferences making this playoff expansion decision have come out very publicly against any kind of lawsuits and legislative proposals that would include paying players or letting them unionize and collectively bargain.
Conveniently, college football’s power brokers will launch Playoff 2.0 after the new NCAA rules and potentially a federal law allowing players to cash in on their name, image and likeness is in place. That will give them the ability to argue that the playoff platform allows more athletes to be on a bigger stage where they can market themselves and earn money from endorsements.
It will be the justification to make more money for the conferences, the schools, the coaches and the administrators while giving nothing to the players who will have to put their bodies on the line at least one more time without getting more compensation for their role in the show.
When playoff expansion talk began bubbling up a few years ago, the accompanying question was whether the season would have to be shortened by a game or perhaps the conference championships would go away to balance things out given how much pressure their was on college sports to meaningfully address player health and safety, long- term injury care, insurance and other issues that were finally getting the attention they deserved.
Instead, the conference commissioners and presidents are just going to blow right past those concerns, lengthen the season and make tons more money while giving the athletes the same deal: a scholarship and a stipend.
For the health of the sport, Thursday’s decision to expand the playoff is long overdue. It’s also worth remembering those who bear the brunt of college football’s brutality will bear more now while everyone around them gets richer.