How about a six-team College Football Playoff?
The honeymoon period for the new College Football Playoff didn’t last very long; in fact, it was probably over before the semifinal games even started when No. 6 TCU viciously thrashed Ole Miss — the same Ole Miss that knocked off Alabama earlier in the year — 42-0 in the Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl.
On a dark, dark day for the state of Mississippi, the four-team playoff format also received a fair amount of criticism after the snubbed Horned Frogs bludgeoned a once-mighty SEC West foe — criticisms that quickly evolved from small rumblings to full-blown protests the next day after Oregon did Oregon-things to Florida State and Ohio State took down Bama with a third-string quarterback.
“The four-team playoff is not fair!” croaked the masses on social media. “If only we had an eight-team playoff!”
The calls for an eight-team playoff have been there long before the opening kickoff of the 2014 season. Many prominent figures in college football, including Stanford head coach David Shaw, have publicly expressed their support for doubling the size of the current field. Given the statement TCU made on New Year’s Eve, and that they were still spectators for New Year’s Day’s national semifinal matches, change seems inevitable.
But is an eight-team playoff really the best solution? I’m not completely convinced. The college football regular season is pure magic because every week turns the tides of the season. In an eight-team playoff, the regular season loses some of its luster. Under the current rankings, the Mississippi State Bulldogs would have qualified for an eight-team playoff despite losing two of their final three regular games — not including their Orange Bowl beatdown at the hands of Georgia Tech.
What significance does a regular season have if a team can slide as precipitously as Mississippi State and still find themselves playing for a national title?
On his radio show, ESPN personality Colin Cowherd expressed his support for the current four-team format saying that with four spots and five power conferences, somebody gets screwed, but we love it when somebody gets screwed.
But that’s precisely the reason why a six-team playoff might work very well. It would essentially guarantee a spot for every Power 5 conference champion without overly diluting the value of the regular season. Six spots would also give the Boise States of the country a fast track to get into the playoff.
A six-team format seems to work extremely well in the NFL playoffs for each of the league’s conferences, though the league is trying to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by expanding the size of the playoff field. With the huge success of the playoff format in the pros, maybe it makes for the college game to adopt it as well.
Here’s how I imagine a six-team college football playoff going down: All five power conference champions have the inside track to a playoff spot with the additional spot going to an at-large team. Obviously, this arrangement is playing with fire, especially if a conference decides to pull an NFC South and flat out stink for a year. However, I think that’s a risk we can be willing to take (maybe we do love it when somebody gets screwed).
Once the six teams are selected and seeded, the top two teams get a first round bye just like in the NFL, while the other four teams battle it out in the first round. In this format, there would be a total of five playoff games (two first round matchups, two semifinal games, and a championship). We could have the four former BCS bowls (Rose, Sugar, Orange and Fiesta) host the early rounds while Jerryworld (or something similar) hosts the championship. The Cotton Bowl and the Peach Bowl would no longer be slated to host any playoff games, but they didn’t really belong anyway.
Am I being completely crazy? Probably. I’ll likely wake up the morning after writing this column and wonder how I could have ever taken this idea seriously. But for the time being, this seems like a really intriguing idea and a good resolution to the current College Football Playoff controversy.
Your move, NCAA, but don’t get up too fast. It might hurt after all these years of inertia.
Vihan Lakshman thought about advocating for a 128-team playoff, which would include every single team in the Football Bowl Subdivision. The numbers work out perfectly! It would take exactly seven weeks to crown a champion! But then he thought better of it. Let him know how many teams you want in the playoff at vihan ‘at’ stanford.edu.