College Football Playoff expansion a bad idea at any time

The College Football Playoff has come under fire again this season, with the talk of expansion becoming more prevalent. Let’s not mess up a good thing.

With two Power-5 conferences — Pac-12 and Big 10 —  being left out of the latest edition of the College Football Playoff, the gnashing and wailing from various conference commissioners and fans to expand the four-team playoff format has reached a new level, with some even reporting that “serious discussions of expansion” will happen this year.

The reasoning most cited for expansion is that the FBS is the only level of college football which does not have a tournament style playoff format with 16 teams allowed into the field, and that the NCAA does not sanction the current College Football Playoff format used in the FBS.

My response…Who cares?

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Having something sanctioned by the NCAA has about the same impact as the gold star your 6th-grade teacher put on your Christmas theme. As for the FBS being different than other levels of college football or pro sports why shouldn’t they be?

In the NBA, 16 of 30 teams make the playoffs. 53 percent.
In the NHL, 16 of 31 teams make the playoffs. 52 percent.
In the NFL, 12 of 32 teams make the playoffs. 38 percent.
In MLB, 10 of 30 teams make the playoffs. 33 percent.
In the FCS, 16 of 125 teams make the playoffs. 13 percent.

In FBS college football, only three percent — four out of 129 — of all college football programs in the league make the College Football Playoff. What should that tell you? The College Football Playoff actually rewards excellence instead of granting automatic entry based on flawed divisional systems.

That’s exactly how it should be.

If Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany and others get their way — forcing the playoff to expand to eight teams — it will water down what has been the best thing to happen to college football since the forward pass.

The four teams who are chosen by the College Football Playoff Committee aren’t chosen because they happened to win a weak conference, or played a schedule full of mediocre opponents and managed to stay undefeated (ahem…UCF) or because they were ranked highly by coaches or sportswriters. They are chosen because 13 people looked at the overall body of work for each team, reviewed films, engaged in debate and then gave us the four best teams in the nation.

And let me dispel one myth right now. There is no “SEC bias” among the committee, so don’t even try waving that banner. That dog don’t hunt.

Here’s the breakdown of conference affiliation among the current CFB Playoff committee members:

ACC – 2 (Todd Stansbury, Frank Beamer)
Big 12 – 1 (Joe Castiglione)
Pac-12 – 2 (Paola Boivin, Rob Mullens)
Big Ten – 1 (Gene Smith)
SEC – 2 (Scott Stricklin, Bobby Johnson)
Conference-USA – 1 (Jeff Bower)
MAC – 1 (Herb Deromedi)
FCS – 1 (Chris Howard)
And then there’s Ken Hatfield, who coached in the SEC, ACC, and Conference-USA

If you see any way the SEC could receive a biased view from that list, you are manufacturing something which isn’t there.

Every committee member is required to recuse themselves from any rankings or discussion of rankings about schools with whom they are affiliated, so to claim that any conference – particularly the SEC – is getting preferential treatment couldn’t be further from the truth.

It’s about who the four best teams are, regardless of which confernece they belong to, or (in the case of Notre Dame) don’t belong.

The only question is, do we want the four best teams competing for the national championship, or do we want to have a scenario where a bunch of decent-to-good teams play? Do want to reward teams who have played (and won) a brutal schedule and looked great doing it, or do we want to throw the automatic qualifier bone out there for these programs who are apparently feeling left out?

The current four-team format not only rewards excellence, but it keeps the season interesting down to the last play of the last game. The final rivalry weekend can mean much more than just bragging rights, and conference championship games can essentially be a play-in (I hesitate to use the word quarterfinal) for the semifinal games.

Sure, adding more teams would appease a few close-but-no-cigar scenarios, but in the end, you’d still have teams on the bubble who complain that they were more deserving than someone else who was selected. So then we add more teams, and more people complain. It’s not a just a slippery slope, it’s a huge crevasse with no bottom in sight (see: NCAA Basketball Tournament).

We don’t need to add more games, we put enough pressure on these kids already. We don’t need to kill off uber-popular conference title games or put the kibosh on more storied rivalries for the sake of beefing up the playoff.

College football is special. It’s different, and those who are keepers of the sport should strive to keep it that way. The highest level of college football doesn’t need a milquetoast postseason filled with automatic qualifiers and pedestrian programs. We need it to remain a highly competitive and debated format which rewards those teams who have set themselves above the rest of the league.

Expansion is a bad idea now or down the road. You want in? Play a tough schedule, win your games, and don’t suffer a loss to a weak team. That’s “Who’s In”. Pretty simple.