The best way for any business to balance its budget is to: (1) reduce costs; and (2) increase income.
For college football, the effort to reduce spending includes declaring CHAOS! due to the late arrival of free market forces in the economic model and to ask Congress for permission to cheat, through an antitrust exemption. And the strategy to make more money is to increase inventory.
So it’s no surprise that the powers that be want to expand the size of the College Football Playoff from 12 teams to 24. More games played means more games on television, which means more money from the television network that broadcasts the games. And so, via the television network that will benefit from turning some meaningless bowl games into meaningful playoff games, a deal to double the playoff field. arrived. And the 24-team playoffs would take place as early as 2027.
Already, the first rounds of the CFP feature many unbalanced matches. And for good reason. Unlike the NFL, where “Any given Sunday” (or, more accurately, “Any given day except Tuesday and most Fridays and Saturdays”) makes every game a potential upset, the quality of the respective teams at the college level makes blowouts more likely when the best of the best play the good teams, but not the best.
Through two years of the current formatthere was only one match with a score in the first round. And while first-round winners have done well against higher-ranked teams emerging from an extended break against a team strutting around the ring in sweat, that unintended momentum for second-round underdogs will disappear when the process necessarily compresses.
Under the new format, eight teams would get a week off while the other 16 play, reducing the total field to 16. What will happen when the No. 1 team faces the winner of the match between No. 16 and No. 17? Or when the No. 2 team plays the winner of No. 15 against No. 18? Or when team #3 plays the winner of game #14-19?
More games doesn’t mean better games. This will mean more frogs will be kissed in the slim hope that the game will eventually turn into a prince.
The other practical impact will be to expose the best players on playoff teams to up to five additional games before the hay is in the barn on their entry into the NFL. This increases their chances of getting injured, while also making it much harder to justify the now-common decision to skip a postseason bowl game that doesn’t result in the chance to win a championship.
Why would players want this? Yes, in theory they would all like to win a championship. But they would also like to be fairly compensated for their efforts while preserving their ability to be fairly compensated at the next level.
The end result for players, thanks to the Protect College Sports Act and the expanded playoffs, will be less money, more work and an increased risk of having their draft stock undermined by an injury occurring in one of the extra games.
But that’s where the puck moves, especially when players aren’t meaningfully represented in any aspect of this process. Much of this can be attributed to the four-letter network which is quietly pushing for antitrust exemption while lobbying more visibly for more games that pay a bigger prize than being covered in mayonnaise or eating a giant Pop-Tart.
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