The NFL proves the College Football Playoff is a joke
Stephen H. Provost
To find out why the College Football Playoff is an absolute joke, all you have to do is look at the NFL’s playoff system — and how it’s different.
In the NFC, only one team has made it to the championship game more than once during the past six seasons (Green Bay’s gotten there three times, losing in each case). The New England Patriots have made it to four AFC title games, winning three, but no other team has gotten there more than once. So overall, in the past six seasons, the NFL semifinal games have hosted 17 different teams, which amounts to more than half — 53% — of the league’s 32-team membership.
Compare that to college football, which has 130 teams in its Football Bowl Subdivision, roughly half of which are in the upper-echelon Power 5 class. How many of those teams have made the College Football Playoff’s semifinals in the past six years?
Eleven.
That’s right. Just 11 teams out of the 130 (or roughly 8.4%) have even had a shot at the national championship. You can double that to just under 17% if you’re just including the Power 5, but it’s still a very elite and very small cross-section. And that’s not the worst of it, either. Of 36 games played in the championship tourney, 26 have involved one or both of just four teams: Alabama (9 appearances), Clemson (9), Ohio State (4), and Oklahoma (4).
Alabama’s won twice, and so has Clemson, with Ohio State and LSU claiming one title each. Making matters even worse, four of these five teams are in the Deep South. So there’s very little incentive for anyone from outside this region, or fans of any other school, to give a rat’s ass about who wins. It’s an exclusive club operating on a badly slanted playing field skewed by recruiting advantages, polling biases, and, more than anything, money.
Eight-team option
An alternative would be to expand the playoff to eight teams, with five spots for the Power 5 conference championships, one for the best non-Power 5 (aka Group of 5) team, and two at-large slots that could be filled by any of the 124 remaining Division I teams. This year, that could have allowed Texas A&M, Oklahoma, and Cincinnati to join three of the same tired old entries — Clemson, Alabama, and Ohio State — along with the game’s most prestigious school over the past century, Notre Dame.
It would make things better, but it wouldn’t solve the problem, because the two most frequent entries, Alabama and Clemson, are so much better than the other six that they’d probably meet in the finals for the fourth time in seven years, anyway.
The problem can’t be solved with a new playoff format. It can only be solved by evening the playing field among the 130 Division I schools, the way the NFL does through free agency and the awarding of high draft picks to the worst teams each year. College football has no such equalizing forces, and the teams that win the most games — and make the most money — have no incentive to provide them.
Except, maybe, declining interest from the fans. That’s what killed second-tier pro leagues that couldn’t compete with established circuits. It could kill interest in college football’s perennial also-rans, too.
My alma mater, Fresno State, has produced high-quality NFL players like Derek Carr and Davante Adams, but there’s no way in hell the Bulldogs (a Group of 5 team) will ever make the playoff. Or perennially dangerous Boise State. Heck, Cincinnati was unbeaten this year and didn’t make it. So was San Jose State. The University of Central Florida won all 13 of its games in 2017 and got snubbed.
Shrinking elite
But it’s not just Group of 5 teams that are missing out. Even two of the Power 5 conferences are finding themselves increasingly on the outs. The Pac-12 and Big 12 (which only has 10 teams, while the Big 10 has a dozen — go figure). Only one Big 12 team, Oklahoma, has even qualified for the playoff in the past six years, and two Pac-12 teams have played a total of just three games, losing two.
If the college football season has become little more than a series of exhibitions leading up to a regular four-team rendezvous of Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, and someone else, what’s the point? I’d rather go watch a Globetrotters exhibition or a pro wrestling match. At least those guys are honest about who they are and what they do.
College football pretends to have an open-door policy, but in reality, you have to know the password (money + tradition) to gain access. And increasingly, fewer and fewer programs have that winning combination.
Until the NCAA finds a way to level the playing field between the haves and have-nots, it will only get worse, and since those “haves” have got every incentive to keep widening the chasm, it’s highly unlikely that anything will ever change.
Or that I’ll start to care about college WWE... er... football ever again.
Featured photo: Alabama takes on Clemson in the 2019 championship game, an all-too-familiar sight in the College Football Playoff, by Legoklm, Creative Commons 4.0.
