On Saturday, at the familiar but still awkward kickoff time of 11 a.m., Texas A&M participates in its first 12-team College Football Playoff. Two weeks later — and somehow not at AT&T Stadium but in Miami — Texas Tech makes its much awaited 12-team CFP debut.
This comes one year after Texas and SMU played in the inaugural 12-team CFP, so it has been a nice run of Lone Star teams over the last 12 months. But this may be it for the 12-team tournament. CFP and ESPN officials have until Jan. 23 to come to terms on a 16-team playoff that could begin as early as next year.
It’s largely up to the Big Ten and SEC commissioners reaching agreement on their differences, and if it happens, although I am not a fan of the extended football tournaments to begin with, I am willing to lend a hand. The current production is a mess and some of the fixes are easy enough. The rest require only a minimal effort at using one‘s imagination.
In the initial 12-team run, only two of 11 games were decided by fewer than 10 points. Unless you’re an Ohio State fan, it was not a memorable venture. It took just one season of granting the top four seeds to conference champions (Boise State was No. 3) to realize what a bad idea that was, and that has been rectified. Doesn’t mean problems don’t remain.
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As long as those in charge are going to insist on playing first round games on college campuses, we will continue to have blowouts. This isn‘t the NFL. Home-field advantage is enormous in the college game. Why don’t we just give Duke and UConn and Arizona a couple of first-round games at the start of the men’s basketball tournament like the women do, for attendance reasons? It would be a joke.
The average margin of the four first-round games in 2024 was 19.2 points with the lowest being Notre Dame’s 27-17 win over Indiana. This year is more promising with Alabama-Oklahoma likely to give us a close contest and Miami at least capable of doing the same in College Station. I wouldn’t count on James Madison or Tulane being anyone‘s concern beyond halftime Saturday.
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So if we are locked into a 16-game future, are we talking about 1 vs. 16, 2 vs. 15 and so on? With the ones and twos playing at home? What a horrible idea. Let’s fix it.
There’s no need for a dead playoff weekend after the tournament is set. Army-Navy doesn’t take up 12 hours. Rip a page from (of all things) the NBA‘s play-in handbook. You want Texas and Notre Dame and the others that nearly missed in your 16-team field? Let them play each other (13 vs. 16, 14 vs. 15) at fun neutral sites while the rest of the field sits. Then you roll into week two with six games instead of four. Play one on Thursday, one on Friday and have four games with (gasp) overlapping times where fans have to decide which game to watch for an hour or two. That script doesn’t exactly hinder the first three rounds of March Madness. Heck, the NFL now gives us competing Monday Night Football games on a number of weeks.
It’s OK. No one wants to watch every play of every game, anyway. Like the trend to smaller stadiums and arenas, creating demand is not a bad idea. You’re still going to have some one-sided affairs with 3 playing the 14-15 winner, 4 playing the 13-16 winner, 5 playing 12, etc., but that‘s got a lot to do with ESPN’s insistence on playing home-field advantage games, not mine.
The top two seeds earn byes instead of the top four. Make the SEC and Big Ten champions automatic 1 and 2. It makes sense (flipping Georgia and Ohio State wouldn’t hurt anything) and it keeps the commissioners happy. That’s all that matters, anyway, right?
Beyond that, the biggest issue is the length of the playoff. It still feels like way too much to the average fan who was used to wrapping things up on New Year’s Day. And the worst part is a continued determination to stage the championship on a Monday night. This year that will be Jan. 19 in Miami. Do the college powers recognize that America’s football fans have just overdosed on 14 hours of NFL playoffs on Jan. 17-18?
There is no buildup to the title game. It just pops in from out of nowhere after the NFL has held the spotlight in its grasp all weekend.
Oh, wait, here’s another game, honey, it’s Ohio State and Notre Dame, do you mind if we watch this one, too?
Play it on Wednesday or Thursday of that week. Are you worried about the players rushing back to physics classes for the second semester? What are we thinking here? Give the game a couple of days of hype to remind the average fan that it’s not time for college basketball just yet.
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