Yup and all those teams they beat along the way will have fans sore about it, too, and griping all the way.
It’s fine - the playoff system is what it is, but I don’t harbor any illusions that it is any more objective or fair than any other system we’ve tried so far or any expectations that this will finally get fans to really settle down.
IMHO the starting point should be separating the Group of 5 into their own division. Then complete a realignment into 4 power conferences of 16 teams each. Have the conference championships be the first game in an 8 team playoff. That should be enough teams. Yes, it’s possible a #9 seed / the third best team in a power 4 conference, could make a run, but if they did, it would almost certainly be due to getting lucky rather than being the best team.
ETA. We could couple that with getting rid of the traditional first three games of the season being out of conference curb stompings of significantly weaker opponents and replacing those games with in conference games. That would also go a long way towards fixing the problem of a 10-1 team who got unlucky in rivalry week missing out on a conference championship game.
ETA 2. Week, not weak
This is an excellent idea, except that next year the Big 10 will have 18 teams, the ACC 17, and the SEC and Big 12 16 each. That’s 67 teams, plus Notre Dame for a total of 68. So each conference, I suppose, could have 17 teams. (This would also, finally, put Notre Dame in a conference.)
Obviously scheduling would be an issue, but ISTM that partially basing each year’s schedule on last year’s results would ensure that the top teams in each conference would have tougher schedules than the bottom tier of teams.
(If you add Washington State and Oregon State into the mix, then there would be 70 teams. And maybe we’re back to five conferences.)
72 would still be manageable, and could increase the numbers in a playoff. Have 4 power conferences, each with 3 divisions of 6 teams. The winner of each division plus one wild card in round 1, the conference championship as round 2, than a national semifinal and final.
There might still be a rare instance of a team that wasn’t the best winning it, like the 2007 NY Giants did in the NFL, but for the most part my guess is it would be rare.
I like it. Who do we contact to make it happen?
Theoretically if the entire league were the 4 power conferences then any out of league game would be competitive - at least more than Appalachian State or North Dakota.
There would need to be some form of revenue sharing though. Those curb-stompees count on that money to maintain athletic departments - particularly given Title 9 issues.
The biggest issue I see is that college football and most other college sports aren’t really aligned. Your plan would work best if those conferences were football-only and we had other conferences/alignments for non-football sports. They should typically be MUCH more regional to reduce travel expenses. Kind of like hockey works now, but for pretty much everything not football.
Under such a scheme, you wouldn’t have out of league games in the regular season. Those would be saved for the playoffs. Not that there have historically been many such games, anyway.
I’ve got quite a few gripes with how CF works and some ideas how to address them.
Expand playoffs to 16 teams. Include every single FBS conference champion. For years we’ve told the mid-majors “Sure, on paper you’re one of us. We’ll let you go to some fleabag bowls and we’ll let you travel to our favored teams to give them an easy win and you a paycheck, but we don’t care if you’re 12-0 you aren’t going to play for all the marbles.” We’ve got 10 conferences, a 16 team playoff lets everybody play. This still allows for 6 also rans (no more than 1 additional team in any conference) and/or independents.
Make everybody play 10 conference games (5 home and 5 away) and 2 non-conference games (1 home and 1 away). No more scheduling 3 home games against cupcakes.
Make everybody play their games against teams from other conferences at the start of the year. This still allows independent schools to be on the schedule any time of the year but should eliminate the SEC’s traditional Massacre Saturday on the second to last game of the year when they bring in cupcakes to run the score up on so as to make the pollsters forget about any previous loss.
For conferences with divisions, make them rotate the cross division schedule (allowing for traditional rivalries). Ever notice how Alabama manages to avoid playing the better cross division teams? That ain’t no accident. For non-divisional conferences, make sure there is rotation in the schedules and the fat cats aren’t feasting on lesser teams every single year.
Improve the officiating by having the NCAA hire, pay, and assign all the officials. Too often the conference officials favor the team in the playoff hunt against a conference foe late in the season.
Get rid of the transfer portal and the NIL crap- they lead to the rich get richer trend. You sign with a school, you get a free college education that actual students would love to have. Be happy with what you got and stay where you signed.
Get rid of the committee. Come up with a point system similar to what some states have for high school football. You get points for beating someone plus points for teams that your opponents beat and you also get some, but fewer, points for teams that you lost to beating other teams. Don’t get as many points as you like by beating Little Sisters of the Poor? Then don’t schedule them.
Seed the playoffs by the point system. Higher seeds play the first round at home. Quarterfinals play at the former fleabag bowls. Semifinals at the Rose and Sugar bowls. Finals played as they are now.
I think it should be a limited NIL. If the school is making money off selling the star quarterback’s jersey he deserves a few ducats.
Not that I dislike many of the suggestions but they seem to ignore the ginormous elephant in the room - the college football championship is not administered by any real central body with any real ultimate authority.
The NCAA has some rules but scheduling, conferences, etc are at the discretion of the individual schools and conferences.
I suppose if the suggestion is to enact legislation at the federal level, these could all happen. But most of these changes would require the relevant conferences and member schools to agree to them, which is why it has often taken years to agree to a college football playoff system in the first place or to make any changes to it - those individual schools and conferences did not agree to them initially. And why would the big schools do that at all if it means less revenue?
Maybe we say “well, take it or leave it”. And then, they do. The big schools (for football) leave that system and set up their own little playground that looks remarkably like what they had in the past. And ESPN and Fox will follow the big conferences, because the NCAA, as a body, has only as much power as its member institutions allow it to have
There are rumors that the SEC and Big Ten are now pushing for 4 automatic qualifiers each, leaving 4 open spots for the rest
There’s no “getting rid of the NIL crap” without the expressed consent of the students or an act of Congress. Because limiting individual commercial liberties has been correctly adjudged to be against the law.
Certainly there are legal issues involved but as is, the “prestige” schools carry with it the possibility of earning significantly more in NIL than smaller schools. This is going to kill competitive balance.
This is the only part I’m not fully behind but I love the rest of your post. You’re not at all wrong about the rich getting richer, but I feel like now it’s just about the richest programs having to admit some of what they do (and have done) to get where they are.
College athletes should get paid above the table and on the record. That doesn’t mean it should be a free-for-all but I’m not in favor of anything that moves backwards.
It may take some time but I don’t see anything wrong with negotiating to ensure players still make money off of their own NIL while also attempting to keep things reasonably fair between the monster schools and the smaller programs.
I do find it incredibly frustrating that this issue is almost always viewed through the lens of men’s football and men’s basketball without any consideration for numerous other college sports programs. Do anti-NIL people really believe that Olympic athletes shouldn’t get paid in 2024?
The transfer portal definitely needs some work. I don’t like the “everyone has to sit” version that we saw before Covid, but I also believe the current model should probably be refined a bit more.
There’s plenty of NIL money outside of football and men’s basketball. On top of that, there has always been “one free transfer” in those sports, except for baseball, women’s basketball, and men’s ice hockey.
NIL is viewed through football and men’s basketball as, for the most part, NIL in those sports is just an excuse for each school’s fans to pay athletes to attend/stay. The NCAA is trying to crack down on abuses - look at Florida State - but it’s slow going.
How can you refine it more than “you get one free transfer - after that, you sit out a year”? The only reason that isn’t the rule right now is, somebody got a court injunction preventing the NCAA from enforcing it. Well, that, and things the “graduate transfer rule” (I put it in quotes because it is nowhere in the NCAA Bylaws) and the NCAA seemingly granting waivers to anybody who was injured for 2/3 of a season. (In Division I, the rule is supposed to be, once you start attending classes or practice, you have five years to compete, period; the only things that “stop the clock” are military service and a bona fide religious mission.)
As for “keeping things reasonably fair between the monster schools and the smaller programs,” explain how the NCAA is promoting this by, er, getting rid of its “if your men’s basketball team wins its regular season championship but does not get into the NCAA tournament, it is guaranteed a spot in the NIT” (a rule that applied almost exclusively to smaller conferences) in favor of guaranteeing each of the Power Six conferences not only a spot in the NIT, but a first round home game. Also, the new NCAA President has suggested that Division I form a new subdivision for the “top tier” schools that would allow players to be paid through trust funds.
Yeah, Livvy Dunne can command big NIL money because her 7.5 million TikTok followers make her valuable to advertisers – it has nothing to do with her attending LSU. But I suspect that Quinn Ewers isn’t getting paid $1 million because companies are just desperate to reach his 55k Twitter followers.
My response would be why that should even a goal. Why not handle it by splitting the smaller programs away from the monster schools rather than trying to make things more equal?
Here’s a thing … why not get rid of some of these jobber college teams that haven’t won anything for 50 years ?
Ah…and that strikes at the heart of it.
Why even have big money college athletics at all, in that case? We all know the big money programs are basically semi-professional sports with a veneer of amateurism to allow them, until recently, not to pay their players and to allow for monopolistic behavior. No other country does this. Universities in other countries are generally considered educational institutions, not legally protected for-profit athletic corporations.
We, as a society, basically want to have it all. We want to pretend like the big schools are still primarily motivated by the education (yes, yes, some do put more effort into it than others but it’s not the primary goal). But we also want to have them play sports at the highest levels. And toss in the money motivation on top of that.
But we want to hold onto that collective delusion a little while longer. Want to get rid of NIL? I’m ok with that - as long as you get rid of the rest of the big money apparatus as well, including TV contracts, coaches vastly paid more than any other state employee, boosterism of all sorts and at all levels. Make college sports truly an extracurricular activity for students and I’m ok with no more NIL. Of course, that means no more big money for anybody else, and we can’t have that, can we?
We want to eat our cake and have it, too. We’re the real problem. We want contradictory things and we want those goals to defy reality and human nature while we’re at it.