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The Only Solution to CFP Reform

College football is on the brink of changing its post season once again. After only 7 years the powers that be have changed their tune and are looking towards possible expansion. They claim that they have 63 different proposals, which hopefully they release at some point because that number sounds absurd. They need to throw out any that don’t include a path for all 10 conference champions to make the championship. The best ones though will still allow BYU, Notre Dame, and new FBS teams to remain independent.

The postseason for college football has been absolutely unwatchable the past few years. Players don’t care about bowl games and will leave to start prepping for the NFL draft – good for them, you can’t fault someone looking out for their own best interests. But we’re not looking at the choices the players make, we’re looking at a ways that the product can improve. To me the bowl season is one of the best parts of the holiday season. The fact that ESPN owns almost all the bowl games and has put a monopoly on the postseason is why the product has gotten so bad. They aren’t looking for the best matchups on the field, rather they’re looking for the safe bet based on the college size. So it’s not a reward for the teams that have had good seasons, they pin group of 5 teams against each other and power 5 teams against each other almost like they don’t acknowledge that’s an arbitrary subdivision for the most part. For postseason reform though, it needs to have both the bowls and the playoff – while improving on both of those.

For any proposal to be viable there needs to be a path for any team to win the championship in a given year. Get rid of this nonsensical notion that a team needs to establish they’re a winning program first. UCF started doing this a couple of years ago and by the time they were respected they didn’t even have their best team anymore. Anything that grades how a team did more than 4 years ago is trash. Get rid of that thinking – college players are around for at most 6 years, many are only around for 3 or 4. With that in mind, how can any team’s success this year be based on the assumption from a decade ago. Sure high school scouting has gotten better and rankings seem to have improved, but we don’t have a test to prove it on the field right now. Even the 4 team playoff is just an elaborate way to show confirmation bias. But I digress, for my proposal I give automatic qualifiers to all 10 conference champions and even to the top ranked independent team. Here’s what that would have looked like last year. (Note: for these results I take the regular season standings and ignore the conference championship game. I’ll cover more on this later)

SEC – Alabama

ACC – Notre Dame

Big Ten – Ohio State

Big 12 – Iowa State

Pac 12 – USC

American – Cincinnati

MAC – Buffalo

C-USA – Marshall

Sun Belt – Coastal Carolina

Mountain West – San Jose State

Independent – BYU

There we have our initial 11 teams – some would say only add one more and go with a 12 team playoff and give byes to the top 4 teams just like the NFL did for about 30 years. I don’t like that, if there Power 5 conferences are as good as we think they should easily blow out a lower tier conference winner and basically have a bye week playing. So I say make every team play every week. The only way to do that is to go to 16 teams. Which leaves us with 5 spots to fill out. To do that I think we bring in the CFP committee – use those rankings they give out each week and make some use of it still. However, I think the past few years – and last year especially the committee was lazy and watched less football than the AP writers who cast votes. Because of that, for my example I’m going to use the AP rankings because I just think they were more accurate. Here are our next 5 teams:

  1. Clemson
  2. Texas A&M
  3. Indiana
  4. Florida
  5. Georgia

Now we’ve got 16. teams, but we need to put them together – let’s call on our friends at the CFP committee again and have them seed out the teams. (technically the AP, but you get the idea)

  1. Alabama (SEC Champion)
  2. Notre Dame (ACC Champion)
  3. Ohio State (Big 10 Champion)
  4. Clemson (At Large Bid)
  5. Texas A&M (At Large Bid)
  6. Cincinnati (American Champion)
  7. Indiana (At Large Bid)
  8. Iowa State (Big 12 Champion)
  9. Coastal Carolina (Sun Belt Champion)
  10. Georgia (At Large Bid)
  11. Florida (At Large Bid)
  12. USC (Pac 12 Champion)
  13. BYU (Independent top ranked)
  14. Buffalo (MAC Champion)
  15. San Jose State (Mountain West Champion)
  16. Marshall (Conference USA Champion)

The field is set and the teams are ranked. Setting up the matchups is easy, we’re just going to follow the same formula the NCAA basketball tournament does – 1 plays 16, 2 plays 15, and so on. Keeping the exact matchup as well – making the possibility for playoff pools all the fun that comes with it. The next piece of the puzzle comes in with the location of the games. To me college games are meant to be played on college campuses. It’s a shame that the season gets to continue into December without those stadiums being filled. Plus I’ve often felt that the bowl games give too much of an advantage to the southern (local) teams. Give the better team an added advantage of home field – at least for the first 2 rounds. So that’s what I’m doing for my proposal. Round 1 and Round 2 are hosted by the higher ranked team – The fun game that stands out in our example is Florida traveling to Cincinnati.

For the Semi Final and Championship games I say bring back the big bowl games – Sugar, Cotton, Peach, Orange, Fiesta, and Rose will all play hosts. Anyone who can do basic math realizes it’s nearly impossible to fit 3 games into 6 locations, here’s where I get into improving the bowl part of the postseason. The 6 bowls will be divided into 2 groups – Orange, Sugar, Fiesta and Peach, Cotton, Rose (mix and match it if you must, but I like breaking it up into East, Central, and West portions of the country). Alternating years one group will host the semi finals and the championship. Within each group the 3 bowls will rotate which one hosts the championship game.

On the off years from the playoff they’ll host their normal bowls – no longer the “New Years Six” it’s now the “Next Six”. The teams that just missed on the at larges will play in a the “Next Six” bowl games. Continuing on from our Week 16 final week before conference championship games example from before here’s what it looks like.

  1. Oklahoma
  2. Northwestern
  3. North Carolina
  4. Louisiana
  5. Iowa
  6. Miami

I really don’t care how these games are matched up – so we’ll leave that to our friends at the CFP committee since they like making up reasons teams should play each other. Most the time local teams are picked so let’s go say that Orange, Sugar, and Fiesta are hosting the Next Six games. Here’s my proposed matchups:

Orange – Miami v Northwestern

Sugar – Louisiana v Iowa

Fiesta – Oklahoma v North Carolina

Enough of that sidetrack, back to the playoff. We’re set now for Rounds 1 and 2 to be played on college campuses. We’ve got our 3 bowls – Peach, Cotton, and Rose to host our semi finals and championship. The bowls can fight out what order they rotate, but once the rotation is set it stays. For this example I say give the championship game to the Rose Bowl because it hasn’t sold its soul and moved to an NFL stadium. Anyway, the 2 teams that play in the final will add 4 games to an already long season – totaling 17 games. Just as many as NFL teams now will be playing. This, along with blatant power grabs, will be the biggest hurdles to adoption of my playoff proposal. Don’t worry though, I’ve accounted for that.

Let’s start off with the first thing – the conference championship game is dumb. It usually just ruins a teams chance, it’s played in a soulless NFL stadium, indoors, and usually has an overmatched team agains a really good team. It belittles the regular season more than any single game or a playoff would ever do. I say get rid of it. If there’s a tie in you conference for the champion find a way to break it or be one of the 5 at large teams. The setup is giving you more than one opportunity to get in and keeps that window open enough to let in good teams.

Next I’d say cut back the extra conference game unless you’re the SEC then cut out that 4th non conference game. It’s a joke, I don’t need to see Alabama destroy New Mexico State in November and I don’t need to see Ohio State blow out Nebraska more often than they regularly do. I can already hear the complaints coming in though – but what about my (insert mediocre team) they lose a game now. To that I either make them feel terrible for caring about their own self interest over the health and safety of an amateur athlete or I say do what the Big Ten did in 2020 and seed the non-playoff teams for a fun intra-conference-cross-division game. I’m not too concerned about this and only ADs at schools that missed the playoff will care about the lost revenue. I’ll leave it to them to figure out a solution. Anyway, there you have it, 2 games gone. We’re back to where things stand today with the 4 team playoff.

Finally you’ll have to adjust the calendar slightly to fit in the games. Here’s how that’ll look.

August: Week 0 games

September – November: 13 weeks to cram in 11 games.

December: 1st weekend Army-Navy game. 2nd and 3rd weekend – On Campus Rounds 1 and 2 Playoff. 4th Weekend – Playoff Bye, Lower Tier Bowl Games.

January: New Years Day and first week of January – “Next Six” games and Semi Finals. 10 or so days later on a Monday – Championship game.

From a week by week schedule perspective you can make the first round feel like the NCAA tournament with games from Noon to Midnight. Space the games out by 90 minutes and let people flip if the games get bad. Here’s how I’d do it with our example from last year:

Dec. 12 – Round 1

12pm: Marshall at Alabama

1:30pm: Florida at Cincinnati

3pm: BYU at Clemson

3pm: Buffalo at Ohio State

4:30pm: Coastal Carolina at Iowa State

6pm: Georgia at Indiana

7:30pm: USC at Texas A&M

9pm: San Jose State at Notre Dame

Dec. 19 – Round 2 (Assuming no upsets)

12pm: Cincinnati at Ohio State

3:30pm: Indiana at Notre Dame

7pm: Texas A&M at Clemson

10pm: Iowa State at Alabama

Jan 1:

7pm Sugar Bowl

Jan 2:

6pm Orange Bowl

Jan 4:

7pm Fiesta Bowl

Jan 5 Semi Finals (assuming no upsets):

6pm – Peach Bowl: Alabama v Clemson

9pm – Cotton Bowl: Ohio State v Notre Dame

Jan 18 Championship (assuming no upsets):

9pm – Rose Bowl: Alabama v Ohio State

There you have it, the solution to fix the college football postseason. 16 team playoff, no added games to the schedule, bowl games still get to remain, and the champion is decided on the field. How can they possibly mess this up and make another choice? I don’t know how, but really, I know they will.