Stewart Mandel’s logic ($$) escapes me here:
I will continue to shout this from the rooftop: Four teams is plenty sufficient to crown a national champion.
What I failed to anticipate, and what ultimately drove me to change my stance on expansion, is the way a small number of teams, nearly all of them from the same region, have come to dominate the CFP, which itself has come to dominate the sport. It’s negatively impacting national interest in the sport (as evidenced by the two lowest-rated title games coming in the past two seasons) and turning what should be the crescendo of the season into largely an anticlimactic letdown, especially with so many semifinal blowouts and the diminished prestige of the other New Year’s Six bowls.
No Playoff format is going to change which teams dominate the sport, or the scores of the semifinals, but making it a more inclusive event should keep more fan bases in all parts of the country invested in the entire season and restore importance. You’ll very likely get some entertaining early-round games where the teams are more evenly matched and you’ll restore importance to the bowls hosting those games. And believe it or not, you may actually find yourself less bothered by an Alabama-Georgia title game since the teams had to win multiple Playoff games to get there.
I mean, in the vast scheme of things, it’s irrelevant, because the suits chasing expansion are only doing it for the money. But just because I won’t waste any time getting worked up over his reasoning doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly dumb. I mean, a Georgia-Alabama game will be more credible if they blow out two teams instead of one along the way? Who thinks like that?