I know this kind of chatter is a given, due to the time of year, but, please, just stop already ($$).
Parity is often a myth in sports. It doesn’t make the journey to a title, or all of the games that it takes to get to that point, any less exciting.
It’s why college football has arguably the best regular season of any sport. It’s why men’s college basketball has arguably the best championship tournament of any sport.
And these past two weeks — right up to this weekend’s results themselves — have illustrated exactly what college football will be missing the next few years after it punted on implementing Playoff expansion before 2026.
What, you mean bigger paychecks for the P5?
But as followers of the sport, we can certainly continue to scratch our heads and wonder what could have been. Sure, Georgia and Alabama would probably still hold sizable advantages, as the two have squared off for the national title twice now in the past five years and have consistently recruited at a rate that distances them from their peers.
In the end, the results are the results. A blueblood, more often than not, will be the last team standing.
But does that make Alabama’s loss at Texas A&M earlier in the season any less exciting? Or dim the moment when Michigan, another CFP participant this past year, was upset by rival Michigan State in the regular season?
We have that now, sport. What are we missing?
Imagine more of that, but with higher stakes. There will probably never be a Saint Peter’s-like run — there are only 130 FBS programs, to men’s college basketball’s 350 — but the idea that a Kentucky- or Purdue-like college football program could find itself in a tight postseason battle with a Group of 5 team that has been experiencing a Cinderella-like stretch is pretty tantalizing to think about.
Higher stakes? Yeah, Kentucky battling SMU for the right to get the shit kicked out of them by Alabama is the stuff dreams are made of. I don’t think “tantalizing” means what he thinks it means.
The reason there will never be a Saint Peter’s-like run — fuck the word “probably” — is because college football is wired in an entirely different way from college basketball. And that’s not because the field is smaller; it’s because rosters are even more unbalanced.
Again, it’s all a moot point. The suits will expand the CFP because the money is there, period. This “look what March Madness can teach us about CFP expansion” argument is quintessential jamming a round peg in a square hole-type thinking. Quit wasting our time with it.
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