College Football Playoff risks legitimacy, safety with COVID-19 policies

The COVID-19 forfeiture and no-contest policies released by the College Football Playoff endanger the health of athletes and delegitimize the championship.

The bowl season has been forced to confront the reality that the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over. A year removed from one of the most disjointed seasons in the sport’s history, the discovery of new variants of the novel coronavirus continue to impact every aspect of our daily lives.

Far from a matter of individual responsibility, the new strains prove the need for a coordinated and collective response. Shrewd organizations have mitigated both the impacts to their operations and the risks to public health.

The College Football Playoff plan for dealing with the potential for COVID-19 cases decimating the rosters of its four semifinalists does neither of these things.

With Texas A&M announcing that they would not be able to face off against Wake Forest in the Gator Bowl, this contingency plan becomes far more than just a thought experiment. There is a real risk that we could see one or both of the College Football Playoff semifinals canceled as COVID-19 cases surge around the country.

Two questions must be raised in looking at the plan.

1. How does this impact the health and safety of college football players?
2. How does this impact the legitimacy of the national championship narrative?

The first concern must be paramount in our minds, given how even those who survive COVID-19 can deal with long-term symptoms. The latter could impact some semifinalists far more than others.

The COVID-19 policy disincentivizes College Football Playoff teams to act in the best interest of public health.

Insert one of the four College Football Playoff semifinalists into the situation Texas A&M found themselves in with the rise in COVID-19 cases in their locker room. With stakes far greater than the Gator Bowl on the line, would a college football program really shut down its season?

Teams across the country have done everything in their power to field rosters and face opponents over the past two years of the pandemic. Even conferences that originally planned to shutter operations reversed course and cobbled together fall schedules. The financial incentives to keep the show going far outweighed the risks, and that calculus only skews further toward money when the College Football Playoff is the prize.

Alabama is built with a next-man-up mentality designed to churn out national championships at least once every two to four years. Georgia and Michigan are historic bluebloods of the sport that are decades removed from their last national championships and yearning to placate long-suffering fan bases. Cincinnati is playing not just for Bearcats fans but for every Group of Five team left on the outside and begging for a chance to play for a national title.

This isn’t to assert that any of these four programs would force players who test positive to take the field. But how can individual programs exercise caution without a cutoff point of cases at which a team can no longer play? The protocol as laid out by the College Football Playoff is no protocol at all, putting the onus on individual teams to do their due diligence. Much like the NFL has opted to scale back testing of vaccinated and asymptomatic individuals, a program could ostensibly reduce its testing frequency to ensure asymptomatic players aren’t flagged as positive.

Without clearly defined protocols for forfeiture in place, the College Football Playoff is also putting those players who do not contract COVID-19 at greater risk as each remaining athlete must take on a larger role within the game. Athletes might be thrust into roles for which they are unprepared or inexperienced to ensure their team can take the field in the semifinals.

When the option is to either play or forfeit, without any wiggle room to reschedule games of this magnitude, teams will do everything in their power to play. What that means for the quality of competition or the health of the athletes matters little, for the show must go on.

The COVID-19 plan also risks delegitimizing how the results of this year’s College Football Playoff are perceived by the public.

Imagine for a moment what would happen if COVID-19 ravaged the Alabama locker room over the next week leading up to New Year’s Eve. Under the College Football Playoff contingency plan, the defending national champions would be required to forfeit the contest. More importantly, Cincinnati would advance straight through to the championship game as the No. 4 seed without playing a down.

No matter what happened in the ensuing title game, many would chalk up Cincinnati’s mere presence to luck rather than merit. If the Bearcats were to actually win the national title over either Georgia or Michigan in such a scenario, the championship would be accompanied by a giant asterisk and plenty of skepticism about its legitimacy.

Cincinnati would face by far the greatest scrutiny if they were to advance by forfeit, but Michigan would also endure some heat given their longtime absence from the national spotlight. A decade and a half separate the Wolverines from the last time they were relevant on a national level past Halloween, and advancing by forfeit would draw some heat for Jim Harbaugh’s crew.

Fair or not, this skepticism would be far less harsh for the two SEC schools in the College Football Playoff this season. Given how Alabama exposed Georgia in the SEC championship game, though, the Bulldogs would get some flak for advancing by forfeit. Likewise, even Nick Saban’s Tide would be viewed somewhat critically given how many stumbles they’ve endured throughout their 2021 campaign.

None of the four teams in this year’s College Football Playoff enter the playoff with a bulletproof resume. The Bearcats are the only team with a perfect record, but they are also the team with the biggest question marks about their schedule. Everyone else bears a blemish in the loss column. Automatic advancement to a championship game—not to mention the potential that three of the four teams contract enough COVID-19 cases to hand the crown to the last team standing—would become a cause for further criticism rather than celebration.

The College Football Playoff can blame nobody but itself should one of these doomsday scenarios come to fruition.

It is something of a no-win situation for the College Football Playoff that is entirely of its own creation. By holding the dates of the Orange Bowl and Cotton Bowl as sacrosanct, and refusing to build in any buffer around the semifinals should a need to reschedule arise, the organizers effectively delegitimized their own operation.

(That they built a four-day window into scheduling the championship game shows that the powers in charge of the Playoff are well aware of the risks that games might need to be rescheduled. That they did not also do this with the semifinals shows that bowl partnerships still dictate the terms of the discourse in college football.)

If all four teams play, there will always be question marks about how healthy those teams were when they took the field. If any forfeits happen along the way, questions will be raised about the legitimacy of the eventual champion.

For an organization that loves to frame itself as the quasi-official arbiter of the national championship narrative, the College Football Playoff is doing everything possible to keep the narrative as mythical in 2021 as it was a century ago.