SMQ: Expanding College Football Playoff remains as mythical as ever

Thinking about the teams left behind by the College Football Playoff

It is a common trope among pundits and fans alike to assert that there are rarely enough teams to fill out a four-team playoff bracket. This line of reasoning assumes that the only thing that can come from expanding the College Football Playoff is a dilution of the significance behind the national championship.

It is important, though, to keep in mind how these same arguments were used for decades to keep any playoff system from taking root in college football. These arguments were first raised in the 1960s with the initial push to form a playoff bracket. They were raised again in the 1980s, after BYU snatched the 1984 national title and calls renewed for a playoff to determine the national champion. They existed throughout the 1990s, as the Bowl Coalition and the Bowl Alliance tried in vain to legitimize the national championship.

The Bowl Championship Series rarely left the entire country with a satisfactory resolution to the question of who finished the season as the best team in the nation. And if you ask fans of teams like Baylor, TCU, and Stanford whether the College Football Playoff left us with a legitimate national champion in 2014 and 2015, you run the risk of a black eye or getting laughed out of the room.

Expanding the College Football Playoff is a quantifiable good. It means more opportunities for more teams to make a run and shake off the risk of throwing away a season in September, as happened to Stanford in 2015 when they failed to make an undefeated run through their Pac-12 schedule. It means co-champions like Baylor and TCU would have both received their chance to make a run to the national title that was just as probable in 2014 as that actually executed by the Buckeyes.

Two-loss teams with momentum — teams like Stanford in 2015, Penn State in 2016, and Ohio State in 2017 — all showed in their bowl performances that conference champions deserve more chances to play for national spoils. They merely missed that chance because there were too few spots at the table.

Expanding the College Football Playoff increases the number of spots at the table. What it does not do is change the game of musical chairs at the heart of the mythical national championship discussion. If a four-seed could win the Playoff the first time it expanded from two to four teams, it is equally possible for one of the teams ranked No. 9 to No. 12 to swoop in and claim the crown moving forward.

That opportunity is a categorical good for the sport, as increased opportunity begets increased interest from an increased number of fan bases. What we must realize, however, is that it does not change the equation in the national championship discussion. In a system where everything turns on 60 minutes of game play in a single-elimination setup, the variability ensures that the national championship in college football will always retain the mythical qualities that have built it up into such an elusive and sought-after prize over the decades.