“It’s going to expand because they’ll never keep everybody happy.”

I’d like to take this opportunity to personally welcome Mark Schlabach to the ranks of the postseason skeptics.

… Only six years ago, a college football playoff was considered taboo.

What changed their minds? Money, of course. The almighty dollar was the driving force behind one of the most dramatic changes in the sport’s history…

And that’s expected to change when exactly?

He goes on to hint at something in his conclusion that he doesn’t quite tease out in its entirety.

… University presidents will be reluctant to let the college football season stretch from fall semester into the New Year. In an era of increased awareness about player safety, coaches and athletic directors will worry about the physical toll of a three-week playoff, and longtime bowl partners will lobby like crazy to protect the “bowl experience.”

But with 76 teams playing in 39 bowl games this coming season, the “bowl experience” isn’t what it used to be. It’s like beating Tennessee or Texas — everybody’s doing it.

When coaches, players and fans get a taste of the excitement and drama of a four-team playoff, they’ll want more.

If they want to keep expanding the playoffs without extending the length of the season, there’s one way to do that:  compress the bowls, either by shrinking the bowl season or by eliminating some of the bowls.  As Schlabach notes, they’ve already cheapened the bowls by inflating their numbers, so who’s really going to object if CFB offers to swap some meaningless postseason games for more playoffs?  ESPN sure won’t.  The real problem will come when they expand so much that they damage the regular season cash cow.  That’s a genie they won’t be able to stuff back in the bottle.

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Sunday morning buffet

You still get hungry on a long holiday weekend, so here you go.

• I guess Georgia’s bad luck with offensive linemen follows some of them even after they leave.  Hope he recovers.
• If I didn’t know any better, I’d suspect Kansas State was deliberately trying to provoke a challenge to the transfer rules by the way it’s handled Leticia Romero’s transfer request.  A union would be worse for her, though.
• Can the early signing day for football proposal be saved?
• Now the sharks are really beginning to circle around the antitrust litigation.
• Fresno State’s Pat Hill knew what was coming a decade ago:  “For Fresno State to make the cut, Hill said, the university would have to grow its fan base and invest in infrastructure (i.e. a 70,000-seat stadium) so the big boys could literally not afford to leave the Bulldogs behind.“
• At Georgia, athletics spokesman Claude Felton told the Times-Union the school is against selling alcohol at Jacksonville’s EverBank Field when the Bulldogs play Florida and “would not be in favor of alcohol sales in Sanford Stadium at this time.’’  So you’re saying there’s a chance?
• This pretty much sums things up:  “The NCAA is a product of its own membership. Then again, LSU doesn’t want non-football playing Marquette to have the same voting rights when it comes to deciding how it does business.“
• “Thirty-six teams will be banned from the 2014-15 postseason because of sub-par scores on the newest Academic Progress Rate, which was released Wednesday. Not one of them comes from a power conference.”