The College Football Playoff has been a resounding success in some areas, and a frustrating example of the modern sport in others.
Instead of decades of debate over which team with a similar record had the better résumé and bowl win, there’s now a definitive national champion. But for a sport with more than 130 teams, finding the right balance of allowing more teams into the tournament without diminishing the importance of the regular season has been difficult.
Four teams wasn’t enough, which led to 12. And even with 12, there are disagreements over whether deserving programs were excluded. Like last year’s Notre Dame Fighting Irish team being left out in favor of the Alabama Crimson Tide.
As a result, this offseason has been dominated by talk of further expansion. Some schools and conferences, particularly the SEC, favor a 16-team field. The Big Ten, by contrast, has been successfully whipping up support for its 24-team proposal.
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There are pros, well, maybe, a pro, to a 24-team field, and many, many cons. Including devaluing rivalry games, limiting the importance of big regular-season matchups and risking the further degradation of non-conference schedules.
But what do the coaches think about more teams making it? Well, at this year’s SEC Spring Meetings in Florida, Texas A&M Aggies head coach Mike Elko gave a refreshingly honest answer.
“I don’t know why you ask us,” Elko told reporters. “It doesn’t matter what we think. I don’t know why we’re trying to become a trophy sport. What does Mike Elko want? 40. Then I won’t get fired.”
“We don’t have to find a number that allows everyone to get in,” he continued. “It’s OK for it to be hard to get into the Playoff. None of us (coaches) are answering for the good of the sport. We are answering for the good of ourselves.”
He’s right, of course. If coaches are now to be judged by College Football Playoff appearances, logically, they’d want to make it as easy as possible to make it. Though that raises the question, what happens when making it isn’t enough?
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The “good” of the sport has been far down the list of priorities for most programs, conferences and interests for quite some time. College football is dominated by money, as most industries are. The more big games, the more television dollars there are to go around. More dollars means better facilities, recruiting, coaches, and on and on down the line. Few fans think that it would be “good” for the Playoff to expand to 24 or 40. But administrators aren’t fans.
Given how many powerful forces are aligned behind 24 teams, it seems inevitable that’s where the sport is headed. ESPN’s objections aside. And as Elko points out, that, or even more teams, might mean better job security for coaches with the resources he has at a place like A&M.
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But what inevitably would happen in that scenario is that athletic directors and boosters will view making it to the Playoff as a bare minimum. Suddenly, just being selected as an 8-4 team won’t be enough. We’ve already seen that play out with Penn State and James Franklin, who reached the semifinal one year, and was out of a job a few months later.
At least he’s honest that most coaches are more concerned with their job security than the state of college football as a whole. The problem is that goes for just about everyone involved in the sport these days.
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