You will be shocked, shocked to learn that after being shut out of the College Football Playoff the past two years, the Big Ten has had a change of heart about postseason expansion.
“I’m open to the consideration and to looking at it and to thinking about it,” Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel said Monday of playoff expansion. “Anytime our Big Ten champion is left out of the playoff … that’s something that needs to be discussed. Because I obviously believe that you go through and you win the Big Ten championship in this league, you’ve accomplished something that deserves to put you in position to play for the national championship.”
When they move to eight and guarantee each P5 conference an automatic berth in the quarterfinals, I hope they go all in and rename the event the College Football Participation Trophy Tournament. After all, everyone’s a winner.
Get The Picture 
It’s gonna be so f****d when a 12-0 team gets beat by an 8-4 team in their conference championship game. And no, the 8-4 team would not deserve shit, regardless of how you feel about the now 12-1 team.
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excuse me, the 9-4 team
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My thoughts exactly
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Yeah, but who could forget that 9-7 juggernaut NY Giants that beat those 13-3 pretender Patriots in the 2012 Superbowl! That was great, right? Best team certainly won there.
/s
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I don’t care about the NFL but I think a powerful argument could be made that the best team DID win the game. The reason the score is kept in games is so the better team can be determined at the end of the game.
Should the Patriots have been given the Super Bowl trophy and declared the winner of the game because “everyone knows they’re really the best team”?
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If that were the case (the 8-4 team not deserving anything) why would the 8-4 team bother playing? What would be the motivation for the 12-0 team in their conference championship game if they knew they were in the playoff win or lose? Wouldn’t the 12-0 team sit all of their starters and save them for the playoff?
If the 12-0 team is truly the better team, they should beat the 8-4 team in a head to head matchup. If they don’t, the 8-4 team is the better team. I don’t see how anyone could argue the team that lost a head to head matchup was the better team. If that is the path college football goes, why bother with a playoff at all. Simply anoint a team as “champion” at the end of the regular season because some committee decides they are the “best” team. There would be no need to play any of the games.
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Did you miss the key point of the 9-4 team’s (un) worthiness (in a hypo world of auto bids) being separate from whatever you think of the now fallen front-runner. Saying that 9-4 south carolina shouldn’t receive an auto-bid is NOT saying that the 12-1 Alabama team they beat deserves it over them. (in fact, it may be saying that conference deserves no participant at all)
Are you saying the 9-4 team deserves a bid to an 8 team playoff ? Those 4 losses don’t count ? How is that good for the regular season ? How would you ever expect a coach like Kirby to strengthen the non-conf schedule since that’s almost assuredly where those losses would come from in a scenario where a 4 loss team wins its division ?
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Maybe I misunderstood your example. To me, if the playoff is expanded, make sure all the playoff teams are conference champions. Let the UCFs of the world into the dance and see how they do. Tell Notre Dame to get over themselves and get in a conference, ACC or Big 10, or accept they will not be eligible for the 8 team playoff.
By limiting the playoff to conference champions, the penalty for playing tough out of conference games goes away. Georgia could play Notre Dame, Texas, Oklahoma and Clemson in the regular season, lose all 4 games and still win the SEC and get in the playoff. The disincentive to schedule tough out of conference games goes away when winning your conference is the ticket into the playoff. This is how letting a 4 loss team into the playoff helps the regular season.
Do away with any “at large” type teams. Imagine Florida going 10-2 with lopsided losses to Georgia and LSU but their out of conference games are their usual plate of cupcakes. They could easily be a top 10 team come December and not play for the SEC championship but still get in the playoff because they are deemed worthy by some beauty pageant type committee.
I want to see an objective path to the playoff. Win your conference and you are in the playoff, period. I know it would be rare for the MAC champion to beat the SEC champion in the playoff but at least the game would be played and the MAC champion would have a puncher’s chance. The NFL doesn’t have a committee to decide who gets into their playoffs, neither does any other level of organized football I’m aware of.
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If only conference champs qualify for the playoffs, why would a team play tough non-conference games in the first place? They’d be meaningless.
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Exactly. There is still a disincentive to NOT have tough out of conference games in the weeks surrounding your important conference games that get you in position to get that hypothetical auto-bid. Same reason the bye week (or absence thereof) before Florida has been a big deal since.. forever.
I’m just not hung up on objectivity, for 2 reasons. 1. The committee has basically gotten it right from the get-go. 2. Objective criteria (and expansion) leaves many unintended consequences. I don’t want any regular season games to end up looking like that abomination-also-known-as-last-year’s-sugar-bowl. 3. To hell with UCF. Their best teams over the last few years are 5-3 in the SEC, at best.
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errr 3 reasons
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If you can’t win your conference championship, then you get a particaption trophy and get to go to the college playoffs? Why?
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Well, either because you’re Notre Dame or because you were good enough to win the national championship.
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Because Alabama.
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Being in a quaterfinal means you might have to beat Clemson, Bama, and Georgia consecutively to win a national title. That seems impossible for a conference that hasn’t scored a point in the playoffs since 2014.
At some point you have to feel like your conference champ getting shut out and losing by 30+ is worse than not being in it, right?
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Hell no, “not being in it” means not getting any of Mickey’s Money. Bottom line, etc. etc.
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I’m to the point where I’m almost in favor of returning to the old “polls pick the national champion” system. Last year Georgia got locked out because it played a more difficult schedule than Really any of the teams that qualified for the playoff except Bama. If we were still able to win a natty by waxing Texas the team would still have been interested in the bowl and I believe likely would have beaten Texas. The letdown the 4 team playoff causes to teams that don’t make the playoff is undermining the bowls.
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Good post, Mayor
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There is no way I think the old way is a better way of determining a champion.
That said, I’m not going to try and change your mind…I think we are going to 8 sooner than later, and that is the reason Kirby has kicked our scheduling up 3 notches.
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I like Mayor’s solution, but sadly agree with you that we’re going to 8. I believe that’s referred to as a “cod lock cinch”.
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I agree with you, Mayor. Or go back to the old BCS and then we’ll have plenty to talk about during the off season. It will at least preserve the bowls, which I think are a great tradition with CFB.
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Only way the bowls will mean anything again is if the BCS selection was after the bowls, and your team was in the mix. Sadly, we will see players pulling the plug during the regular season very soon if they are not in the hunt for something. In fact, we have already seen it but it wasn’t discussed publicly.
Always supported 8 teams, and would support 6 if it didn’t mean a byes to 2 teams. Conference champs should be an auto-invite because there isn’t enough interaction to know how conferences stack up. AD in post is wrong, you don’t support expansion because the Big 14 champ doesn’t get in, you support it because there will always be at least one conference champ left out. Doesn’t matter which one, it is wrong, and undermines the value of winning the conference championship. I someone wants to support a rule that you cannot have more than 2 losses, or not ranked in the Top X group, I could get behind that as an exception to the automatic bid.
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