College Football Playoff and bowl game system in need of total overhaul

It’s time to talk about giving the College Football Playoff and its accompanying bowl game system a fresh coat of paint.

While the College Football Playoff is infinitely better than its predecessor, the BCS, and while it did manage to somewhat keep the integrity of the traditional bowl game system intact, it’s become clear after the shambles of the 2020 season that another overhaul is needed.

I’ve long been a defender of the College Football Playoff from its beginnings, through its controversies, right up until the 2020 season rankings began coming forth from the committee. But with several glaring issues popping up during a season that was a giant glaring issue in itself, the problems I’ve overlooked can no longer be ignored.

In terms of the playoff system, the first thing most leap to when trying to “make it better” is expansion — bringing the total number of teams involved to either eight or even sixteen.

Is expansion needed? Probably, but not in quite that grand a fashion.

A big selling point for the current playoff format is that it creates a lot of competition and maintains the importance of the regular season. Something that’s always held true in college football is that the regular season is where you make your bones. The postseason is the reward.

There’s no need to jump into an NCAA Basketball Tournament mode here. A system, by the way, which doesn’t ensure that the best teams in the country play for a championship, but maybe the teams who get hot at just the right time or happen to have the most favorable draw in their bracket.

Keeping a system in place that pits the best teams in the country against each other should be the clear goal, and not finding a way to just “include more teams”.

That’s not what college football fans should want, nor what the sport needs. However, it’s clear that only including four teams, with five major conferences and five which are lumped together trying to get in, isn’t nearly enough to reward teams who are deserving of a shot.

Make winning your conference matter to get into the College Football Playoff.

If you want to add some drama of the underdog getting a shot at a national championship, just make winning a conference title a prerequisite for being included in the playoff. Then you have the possibility of a team who maybe didn’t win every game, but who upsets the favorite in the conference title game making their way into the field.

If you don’t win your conference, why would you be considered one of the four teams in the nation? Because a group of people at a conference room table said you passed the “eye test”? I’m all for going beyond the numbers, but at some point, there has to be a line in the sand for who can and can’t become a playoff team.

Not including 2020’s field (which is obviously a little different) we’ve had nine conference champions who were left out while three different teams who didn’t win — or in some cases even play in — their conference title game, selected in the history of the playoff.

Being the best team in your conference needs to count for more than it does now.

Expand the College Football Playoff field…a little.

Moving to eight or more teams in the playoff would have too many damaging effects. It would likely mean the regular season would have to be shortened, causing some out-of-conference rivalry games to possibly be canceled. Not ideal for any fan, and adding too many games to an already long and arduous season would be a lot to ask of athletes who aren’t being paid.

Instead, the committee could choose the top three teams who would have automatic bids to the semifinal games, and then two more teams — fourth and fifth seed — who would have a “play-in” game (even call it a quarterfinal) to become the final entrant in the field of four.

A system such as this would have solved a lot of problems in previous years and made sure worthy teams who were at times unfairly left out at least get a shot at the playoff.

This proposed quarterfinal game could be one of the New Year’s Six bowls not being used as a semifinal game that year. It’s good for everyone involved.

The Group of Five should have an automatic College Football Playoff bid.

The Group of Five conferences — Conference USA, American Athletic, Sun Belt, MAC, and Mountain West — have yet to ever have an entrant in the College Football Playoff, and it’s not that they didn’t have some deserving teams. Teams in these conferences are “punished” by the committee for playing what is described as a weaker schedule.

Weak or not, if you go through an entire FBS college football season without losing a game you deserve more than a cupie doll and an invite to a bowl that doesn’t mean anything other than bragging rights if you win (looking at you, UCF fans).

One of the five proposed slots (as explained above) could be always reserved for a Group of Five team. The conference champion with the best overall record, toughest strength of schedule, and winner of any head-to-head tiebreakers would be chosen to represent the Group of Five. This could also be one of the independent teams other than Notre Dame (who are officially part of the Power-5 for playoff purposes).

If the Power-5 conferences want to flex their muscle about how much better they are and how much tougher their schedules are then they should do that flexing on the field, and not in the press conference rooms.

Give some autonomy to the bowl games not involved in the College Football Playoff.

There’s no arguing that there are too many bowls and some of them have ridiculously bad matchups. But reducing the number of bowls smacks of interfering with commerce. Sponsors pay a lot of money to have their name attached to bowls, so it’s up to the executives of that bowl game to keep it afloat, not the NCAA.

That said, the bowl system can be tweaked to make bowl games more meaningful.

Instead of a flat six-win mandate to be bowl eligible, let each bowl game determine the number of wins they want their participants to have.

You want elite teams in your bowl game? Make it a minimum of eight or even nine wins for a team to get an invite. Struggling bowls can keep a lower minimum and invite who they see fit.

Conference tie-ins should also be eliminated. With the College Football Playoff set up the way it is, it’s become almost anticlimactic determining which teams will go to bowls outside the New Year’s Six. Let bowls determine who they want. Create some competition for the good teams. Let coaches and players decide which bowl they want to attend if they get multiple invites.

The age of attaching conferences to bowl games has long passed, and if some of these games want to survive they need to (in the eloquent words of Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly) stop “worshipping the ashes of tradition”.

In the end, the playoff — or whatever postseason system happens to be in place — is not only there to decide a national champion, but it’s there to bring some attention to players who may only get an opportunity like this once in their lifetime.

Like everything about this sport, it needs to be about the players and the fans who support them. The system we have is good but can be improved. It’s time to stop pretending it’s as good as it can possibly be.