As far as I can tell, this was offered yesterday by The Athletic’s Iowa beat writer without a trace of snark:
What hellish dystopian nightmare is this? Okay, okay, I exaggerate, but the idea that “SEC fans” (cue the Rob Lowe wearing the NFL cap GIF) are going to be emotionally invested in a Minnesota-Wisconsin match to determine which school gets that coveted 15th spot in the playoffs seems like wishful projection to me. And why should any of us GAS about what Big Ten fans think about the Iron Bowl?
To say that any of that enhances the regular season is like saying publishing the spread enhances the college football experience for gamblers. I mean, in a narrow sense, it does, but none of that is what’s made the sport unique and fueled our passion for it.
I know I continue to scream into the void about this, but it pains me to see the eagerness with which some are ready to dilute the sport’s regular season. Almost as much as it pisses me off to see these lame attempts made to convince us that they’re doing it for our benefit, rather than for the benefit of the bank accounts of our college football overlords.
Get The Picture 
This maroon is carrying water for Mickey or has absolutely no clue about what he’s saying. Or both. (They’re not mutually exclusive.)
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Agreed Sir. It’s maddening because “screaming into the void” is exactly what most of us can only do. As we get to the Fall and into the season EVERY network personality at EVERY opportunity is going to be coached by the network to not mention what you lay out on the regular. Conference championships will be nothing, and from there it gets worse. Yeah, it will be a tournament, yeah, it will still be 3 or 4 good games between the 12-3 seeds and the final will be good. Gah
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Ugh
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The idea of conference fans is one that never makes sense to me. I know very few people who actively root for other SEC teams at any point. I would be 100% ok if Florida, Bama, Auburn, LSU, aTm, and Tennessee were below .500 every year, or if in a bowl, got creamed in said bowl.
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My experience has been a direct contradiction to your statement.
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Everybody has a different experience, I guess.
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I see what you’re saying but I got more of a regional feel from that message than a “it just means more”. The media wants SEC fans to get emotionally invested in other regions and they’ll force feed us anything that might move that needle.
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Agree, to hell with em.
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I tend to disagree. When bowl season comes around, I don’t usually actively pull for the individual teams, but when they win I file it under “SEC BITCHES!”
Except Florida. Fuck those motherfuckers.
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I have no SEC loyalty, except to The National Champion Georgia Bulldogs
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Got dang right!
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In a 16:team playoff, not only the regular season, but the SECCG is completely devalued. And where will these games be played? If not the existing bowl venues where fans are not going to be able to afford (or maybe even be interested) traveling to, then the bowls are further relegated to meaningless exhibitions with tons of players opting out. These issues are all obvious, but not one damn talking head rooting for playoff expansion ever addresses them. It’s as if there is some maniacal wizard behind a curtain manipulating the media to ruin the sport for no reason other than spite.
Maybe it is Greg Norman and the Saudis?
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Most human beings cannot think beyond this “logic”: if something is good then more of that is better.
Would a 16 team college playoff be fun to watch? Of course! Then they tie themselves up in knots to justify why it wouldn’t hurt the regular season.
I don’t think most of these people really like college football that much to begin with. So what’s the harm in changing it then?
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If we value the regular season so much, shouldn’t we schedule more compelling September matchups than Samford and Kent State?
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Don’t worry, an expanded playoff will kill the desire to have good non-conference home games too. Why bother? Don’t need to impress anyone.
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Please, Senator, debate this with Andy Staples. He thinks all of us who believe playoff expansion is bad for the sport due to its impact on the regular season are flat earthers who can’t appreciate what our betters want.
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Looking at it from the perspective of most B10 fans I’ve spoken with. It’s natural for them to assume the SEC fans will be switching from viewing their conference games to watch the omnipotent B10 matchup. CFB revolves around the B10 in their world. It takes a B10 fan’s ego to compare a 7-4 Minnesota versus a 9-2 Wisconsin to THE Iron Bowl. In his reality B10 fans will be rooting for Alabama to win. Yeah pass the pipe bubba your toasted.
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Anecdote:
I attended a week-long work training last December, the week after the SEC Championship debacle.
Seated behind me for the entire week were two (very nice) recent college graduate engineering majors from Michigan. And both were huge “Big Blue” fans.
When I found this out and shared I was a Dawg fan, I expected them to tell me how excited they were to play Georgia and how they were going to beat us….
Instead, both kinds rolled their eyes and said something like “you are going to KILL us.”
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Michigan grads aren’t dumb. They know they caught anOSU in literally a perfect storm.
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Except, under the current format, every SEC fan would be rooting for 8-3 Auburn to dominate 11-0 Alabama and keep them out of the playoff. We move to 16 teams and they’ll have an auto-bid every year. 4 at least gives us something to wish for
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Way too many fish to catch and deer to shoot in the Fall before I ever care to watch and see who wins in a Minnesota-Wisconsin matchup. These guys are smoking dope and tweeting at the same time if you ask me.
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That dipstick was one of the guys championing the “Alliance”, and the Big10’s bold stance of voting against the 12 team proposal and leading their partners to slaughter.
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He should clarify that the only people rooting would be the fans of the 15th-team who might sneak in. The rest of us won’t care. I don’t care if Ole Miss or Wisconsin snag a 15 seed.
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It doesn’t. There’s no reasonable argument that an expanded playoff makes the regular season matter – especially if you remove auto bids and essentially make conference championships meaningless as well. I mean, the SECCG was, basically, meaningless for Georgia (FOR GEORGIA!) last season.
A 12 or 16 team CFP means Alabama will never miss the playoff. Ohio State will never miss the playoff (and last year’s OSU-Michigan game has no bearing on the team’s relative prospects because “it’s ok! OSU will get another shot!”). Oklahoma will never miss out. Texas will have a chance (LOL). I mean, we could basically fill half the bracket RIGHT NOW for a 2022 CFP with 16 teams. How does that make the season more significant? It doesn’t.
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And of those games/bracket, we will watch but we won’t “care” beyond hoping that whoever wins would be a good or bad matchup for us. If Texas is playing Penn St, we ain’t pulling for the SEC team. If A&M is playing OhioST, we would pull for the SEC team, just for our own prospects, nothing else.
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I’ll say it, I wanted UGA to win the damn SECCG and knock out Bama, it wasn’t meaningless to me.
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This right here.
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Sure. We all wanted that. The point is that in term of Georgia making the playoff, it didn’t matter. But yes I think you speak for all of us – who spend the entire off season reading a college football blog by a real estate lawyer and bitching about espn and what not – that it wasn’t meaningless to us.
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all it does is probably shifts attention to the 4 teams in to the bottom of the field. WHO ARE THE LAST 4 OF THE 12 TO BE SELECTED? It doesnt make those game more important, it just shifts focus from your best teams to the cannon fodder teams for round 1. This seems like a stupid way to promote your sport to me, but what do I know?
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When we invited pro sports fans into the college game to get more TV viewers it was only a matter of time until someone decided that it should be run like pro sports. Professional sports was conquered by bracket creep a long time ago. The 1997 Florida Marlins were 9 games behind the Braves and the ’03 team was 10 games behind the Braves and yet they’re World Series Champions. There are countless other examples in baseball, but in basketball and football it’s even worse. Eli Manning has two Super Bowl rings despite both of his winning teams being quite pedestrian in the regular season – the second one only won 9 games! Pro sports fans don’t care about the regular season games mattering and they don’t care about the best team winning the championship so I guess we don’t get to care about it anymore, either.
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Look, COULD a one loss or two loss Boise State team manage to beat Georgia or Alabama in a one-off bowl game in a playoff? Sure. Maybe. SHOULD they have a chance? Hell no. What the hell did they do that makes them worthy? COULD undefeated Hawaii have beaten LSU in 2007 in a one-off bowl game? Sure. SHOULD they have gotten a chance? Hell no! Because in our sport the regular season matters – or at least it used to and still should.
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No I won’t be watching other conference games because of playoff bubbles. If I am watching football I will watch the Iron Bowl because, it is the Iron Bowl.
I’ll check the scores in passing for my pick’em, if I am playing one, and I had rather have UGA matched up against a rust belt team. I had rather Bama have to play Auburn twice. We would know which would happen in the brackets watching a game in November. The more this thing expands, the less I will watch.
However, I did watch L’ville upset West Virginia and UCLA upset USC to clear paths for a SEC team get in the BCS CG. If you want me to watch more games bring back the BCS. Even at 4 teams, I would be far less likely to watch those 2 games.
The playoff advocates leading the conferences and designing TV contracts are overplaying their hands. The damage will be done. They will be amazed it didn’t work, and there will be no going back. I am thankful UGA is peaking as the culture and uniqueness of CFB erodes into the sea of big media controlled blandness.
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would not know which would happen
Multi tasking for the loss
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“The less one believes their program is elite or will be in the near future, the more enthusiasm that one will have for expansion”
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Can someone smack that guy for me?
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I wish the SEC would break away from everyone else. Play 4 divisions (expand to 20 teams if you want), 10 regular season conference games, and a playoff with all 4 division winners. Call the winner world champions.
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Fine by me.
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Great idea.
But then….the BIG will do the same and MONEY will clammer for those two “World Champs” to play it off…and we know how much money talks..and it would be a LOT.
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Allow an extra game for a bowl and make sure everyone gets paid, including the players. If undefeated conference winner wants to play another game let someone pay and arrange it.
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The only way Cinderella is making her way to a national championship in a large playoff is if the best teams have key player injuries they don’t have time to recover from.
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Cinderella ain’t making it to midnight in a 16-team playoff. There’s no way a 16 seed goes to a 1-seed campus and wins, then beats an 8/9 seed at a neutral site, then beats a 4/5 at a neutral site, and then beats a 2/3 at a neutral site.
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Minnesota Wisconsin is a game that shouldn’t require “playoff implications” to be “relevant,” especially when both teams are having winning seasons. That’s the point.
Now, Rutgers Minnesota? Yeah, that requires playoff implications for any semblance of watchability, but that never should have been an issue in the first place because “Rutgers is playing Minnesota” is a sentence that should end with “in a bowl game.” But we are in the year 2022 with the mutant Frankensport we still for some reason call “college football” where coverage is primarily devoted to the money other people are making, will make in the future, or will no longer make because they’re going to get fired instead of, you know, actual football games.
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Which Big 10?
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I don’t give a shit about Minnesota or Wisconsin unless we are playing them.
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I absolutely agree. As Nick Saban, Kirby Smart and other head coaches have said time and time again, a bigger playoff field only plays into the hands of the best teams. None of the subpar, non-elite teams are going to do anything at all even if they happen to make the playoffs under a 16 team format or a bigger, stupid field like Mike Leach is talking about.
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I maintain that, on the issue of playoffs, the media writers can’t see past their own excitement for more content to see what actually drives the fan interest.
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