When they tell you the College Football Playoff isn’t going to expand, it’s easy to just chuckle and wait for the inevitable announcement. During the latter stages of the Bowl Championship Series, we heard the same things with even more insistence. There was a time when the sport’s powerbrokers wouldn’t even use the word “playoff” — and then all of a sudden, they would, and a four-team tournament was exactly what college football had always needed, I can’t believe you thought we wouldn’t want one, and so on.
So when Bill Hancock, executive director of the Playoff, says, “There has been no talk about expansion among our board members; they are pleased with the four-team event,” you can be forgiven if you doubt his sincerity. Except for this:
He’s right.
Across college football, in the positions and with the people that matter, in both public comments and in private conversations, there is zero impetus for change.
“Right now, it’s not working poorly for us,” Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson says. “It’s working well for us."
Keep in mind, Thompson was for an eight-team playoff before he was against it. His league unveiled an eight-team proposal way back in 2009. And even with a four-team bracket, the Mountain West is unlikely ever to participate (though Thompson won’t acknowledge the seeming impossibility of crashing the Playoff party). He says the guaranteed access for one Group of Five champion to a New Year’s Six bowl is “meaningful for us.” And he finishes with this:
“I think right now it’s comfortable for four semifinalists.”
Comfortable might be the best way to describe the overall vibe as the fourth season of the Playoff era kicks off. Some of the initial excitement has leveled off, but the Playoff clearly has intensified the conversation, all year long, about college football. And at least for now, the external drumbeat to expand has quieted.
Hancock likes to say there’s a pivot point — is it an eight-team playoff? Sixteen? — at which point the regular season would be diminished. That’s debatable, of course. But he isn’t wrong when he says the four-team bracket has enhanced the regular season.
“It’s difficult to qualify for the CFP,” he says, “and so the teams that do qualify really feel good about what they have accomplished. College football is not like other sports where the regular season leads to what is basically an all-comers meet at the end. With our sport, the regular season is vital. Scarcity breeds significance.”
None of which is to say it won’t eventually go to eight teams — only that it doesn’t seem likely anytime soon.
The Playoff’s official birth date was June 26, 2012, in Washington, D.C., when FBS college commissioners voted for dramatic change. The move was nearly universally celebrated, and at times it was hard to tell whether people were more excited about the end of the reviled BCS or the advent of the Playoff. But even during the two-year interim before it actually began, there were calls to go to eight teams.
A decent bet at the time, at least among those who covered the sport, was that either for competitive reasons (access for more teams) or for financial reasons (around $500 million a year now, why not make even more money?), the bracket would double maybe halfway through the 12-year contract with ESPN. That would be after the 2019 season. But two years and change out, there’s little sense that change is imminent. Or even that anyone is contemplating it.
“Absolutely not,” says Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby — and if there was a commissioner whose conference might be interested, it would be Bowlsby; the Big 12 has been left out in two of the first three Playoffs.
Hancock likes to say every football season is a snowflake, which is true but also a nice way to let the committee pick any team it darn well pleases, for virtually any reason. See Ohio State, picked over Baylor and TCU in 2014 after winning the Big Ten championship game. Or see Ohio State, picked over Big Ten champion Penn State in 2016.
And then see Ohio Sta—wait, we’re not sure what will unfold in 2017. We only know that if the trend of the first three years holds, every year someone is going to be unhappy. Some years, a lot of people will be. But here’s a key difference from the BCS:
In the College Football Playoff, the (so far, only mild) controversy is a feature, not a bug.
Hancock and the commissioners deny it, but it’s in large part why they decided to have the selection committee fly to Texas several weeks in a row in the latter part of the regular season to produce rankings that, by their own admission, are meaningless — only the final selection matters — but which drum up intense conversation and debate until the next week, when a new set of rankings starts a fresh argument.
Even with controversy, the College Football Playoff enjoys an approval rating its predecessor never did. While the BCS grew increasingly toxic, it hasn’t happened so far with the Playoff.
There was the ill-fated attempt to “change the paradigm of New Year’s Eve” by playing semifinals on the holiday. The move, made in order to work around the guaranteed New Year’s Day slots for the Rose and Sugar bowls, didn’t go over well, at all. Although there were multiple factors, TV ratings fell precipitously for games played then. But the commissioners fixed that mistake, sort of — while the games should be on Jan. 1, they’re at least no longer going to be on New Year’s Eve most years.
Regardless, scheduling didn’t engender the same kind of vitriolic reaction as team selections. And so far, even the occasional debate over the bracket has been pretty mild. The selection committee has largely been accepted as an improvement over the BCS’ diabolical amalgam of computer rankings and human poll. (Unless the SEC gets left out one year. If a two-loss ‘Bama misses the Playoff, all bets are off and committee members might need protective details. But so far, so good.)
Going to eight? No time soon. As Hancock says:
“Four teams is the right number for the CFP,” Hancock says. “Four doesn’t go too far — it goes just far enough. … Why monkey with a good thing?”
Yeah, we know. He’ll say that until the day they go to eight. But that doesn’t seem likely to come soon.
