SMQ: What if college football had its own March Madness?

The impact of an expanded playoff on bowl games would be minimal

Another major argument that regularly sprouts up is that an expanded playoff field would kill the traditional bowl calendar. But any playoff would almost certainly integrate bowl sites into the rotation of hosts for semifinals and championship games. The outsized influence of bowl committees would not dissipate due to an expanded playoff.

Consider the way club soccer tournaments work. When teams drop out of the UEFA Champions League, for instance, they don’t automatically go home. There is an avenue for good-but-not-quite-great teams to keep playing in intercontinental competition. Third-placed teams after the group stage shift to the UEFA Europa League. In similar fashion, first-round losers in the tournament could slot into bowl games after falling out of the championship hunt.

March Madness hasn’t killed other postseason opportunities in basketball. The NIT is no longer the premier tournament, but it remains a viable entity. So too do other smaller postseason affairs. Nothing says irrelevant quite like the right to cheer “We’re 101!” Yet that opportunity is on the table with the CBI, after all.

Even the smallest bowl games draw more television viewers than almost any other programming put on air.

That cash cow would continue to generate revenue even with a 32-team playoff field. And, as players said resoundingly in the Seifried and Turner study, the talent on the field would by and large be happy with the chance to play in a bowl game after falling out of the tournament.

Certainly, you would get some individual defections like we have seen in recent years from players like Christian McCaffrey. But teams would still have a full roster of talent to travel to one final exhibition. And that would also provide yet more revenue on top of what would be ballooned playoff payouts.