An Eight-Team Playoff Would Destroy College Football

Let’s just go ahead and accept mediocrity. We should just throw out the regular season in college football, rendering it useless, just so we can have more teams in a playoff like every other sport. In short, let’s take away the most unique thing about college football.

Over the past few weeks, as conference media days were happening, a few coaches and officials suggested just that. The first ever four-team college football playoff hasn’t even begun yet, and coaches like Les Miles are already talking about the prospect of expanding it. If that happens, the sport is destroyed. At least as we know it.

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College football has always had the best regular season of any sport because you had to win every game to make sure you had a chance at the national championship. However, a four-team playoff was understandable because it keeps that aspect of the sport and eliminates the possibility for a deserving undefeated team to miss out on the national championship.

But if you lose a game, I don’t have any sympathy for you. You can’t complain one bit. While a four-team playoff will still keep the regular season important, an eight-team playoff lends credence to the idea that you deserve a spot in the national title game if you lose. That would destroy the sport by itself.

This isn’t to say 1-loss or even 2-loss teams won’t play for the national championship. But it is to say that the college football postseason has always taken away any gripe a team has about being left out of the championship game if they lose during the regular season.

An eight-team playoff will clutter the field with mediocrity, and schools in the Power Five would then have nothing to worry about even after two losses if they’re trying to get into the national championship game.

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  • Really? You get a two-loss mulligan in the sport? What’s next? Expanding it to 16 teams, then 32 teams, so mediocre 3-loss and 4-loss teams get a chance? Should college football become like the NFL, where teams like the New York Giants can go 9-7 and win the Super Bowl despite having a mediocre regular season?

    Of course not. The idea for a college football playoff shouldn’t be to make the case for any team that might be deserving. Those who do that miss the point.

    What’s important is to make sure that if you take care of the things you’re supposed to take care of, you’ll have a chance at the end of the season.

    Take the 2013 season for example. No team outside of Florida State could have complained about being left out of the national title game, because none of them went undefeated. Auburn got the nod. With a four-team playoff, Michigan State would’ve gotten the third spot, and the fourth spot would’ve come down to Alabama, Stanford, or Baylor.

    However, we wouldn’t need a case for an eight-team playoff just to satisfy all of those teams. That ruins the magic of the sport. At that point we would’ve also had to add Ohio State, and then there’d be a fight for that final spot among Missouri, South Carolina, Oregon, Oklahoma, Clemson, and Oklahoma State. Is that really what we want, to give almost any 2-loss team a chance at the national title simply because they might be good enough to win it? And then ignore the flaw in their whining that they wouldn’t have to whine had they not lost one or two games they shouldn’t have lost?

    Of course not. If the sport goes that route, why even play the regular season? I already say that about the NFL, NBA, and NHL, and the MLB is trending in that direction. There’s nothing elite about making the postseason in those sports anymore.

    In college basketball, nobody ever cares when two Top 5 teams play because they’ll both be in the tournament at the end of the year. What are they playing for? That’s never the case with college football. Your team might get a second chance after losing such a game, but it’s not guaranteed.

    If we go to an eight-team playoff, there will be teams who already know they’ve made it in before the season ends, and don’t be surprised if they rest their starters the last week in November or in December. If your team was undefeated and No. 1 going into the last game of the year, wouldn’t you rest your starters, knowing that you’ll be in the Top 8 regardless of what happens?

    That’s what we’re asking for with an eight-team playoff.

    Only twice in the BCS era were there more than four undefeated teams, but both times that fifth team, Boise State in 2004 and TCU in 2009, would not have belonged in the playoff anyway and lost their bowl game. The postseason shouldn’t be about taking the teams who have the best chance to win the national championship. It should be about making sure anybody who has done what they should do in the regular season has a chance to compete, which means going nothing short of undefeated, and then taking the teams with the best body of work after that.

    But in college football, if you have a loss, you don’t have a gripe. Going to an eight-team playoff would destroy that concept.