The Case for a Six Team Playoff

This is the second year of the college football playoff, and despite the incessant doomsaying during the BCS Era proclaiming how a playoff would ruin college football, it has generally been very well received in the first two years of its existence.  Unlike last year’s selections for the four spots in the playoff, there was little controversy this season about who the final four should be, with the only real debate concerning whether Michigan State should be seeded 3^rd or 4^th in the final committee rankings.

There have been calls for expansion since the playoff was first announced and it was decided there would be only four teams. Part of the reason for this is because there are five power conferences, and a four team playoff means at least one power conference will be left out in the cold at the end of each season. Last season it was Baylor and TCU from the Big 12, this season it’s Stanford from the PAC-12. A four team system also basically makes it impossible for a non-power conference team to make the playoff and contend for the national championship. The 12-1 Houston Cougars are a perfect example of that from this season. Whether or not you think this is unfair probably depends on who you cheer for, and what you thought of Boise State’s constant snubs during the BCS era. There will always be some iniquities inherent in any playoff system (including the NFL, which picks playoff participants based on division victors, leading to situations where teams with sub-.500 records make the playoffs), and we cannot expect that college football’s would be perfect, especially not on the first try. That doesn’t mean that we should not try to make it even better than it already is, and for many people that means expansion.

The most commonly proposed solution is to expand the playoff to include eight teams, guarantee conference champions a berth in the playoff, and figure out a way to maybe include a non-power team (and also probably a provision to get Notre Dame in, depending on their final ranking). In some ways this would end up looking an awful lot like the BCS, whose bowls had contractual obligations with each conference. This was one of the flaws in a system that was prone to creating absolutely terrible bowl matchups (UConn vs. Oklahoma from the 2011 Fiesta Bowl, and NIU vs. FSU from the 2013 Orange Bowl come to mind). Any playoff expansion that includes automatic conference tie-ins is prone to this same flaw, and it’s doubtful that conferences would submit to some kind of clause that would lock them out if their conference champs finished the season below a certain rank (though I suppose the likelihood of that happening is slim, but had USC beaten Stanford this season you’d be looking at a 9-4 PAC-12 Champ making it into the playoff under a conference tie-in scenario, despite not being ranked heading into Championship Weekend).

Expanding the playoff to eight teams would also do what every playoff naysayer ever thought it would, which is to say it would devalue regular season games and strip college football of much of the drama that is one of the reasons we love the game. If we were to have an eight team playoff this year, that would include: an Iowa team that lost its conference championship game, a Stanford team that lost to Northwestern and Oregon, an Ohio State team that neither won it’s division nor beat the only great opponent they faced all season (at home, against a backup QB), and a Notre Dame team that similarly lost to both of the good teams they played this season.

If we apply the same situation to the only other data point we have (the 2014 season), this would have meant the inclusion of both Baylor and TCU, who made the Big 12 look really stupid with the “One True Champion” slogan by tying atop the conference rankings, a Michigan State team that lost to the two teams who eventually contended for the playoff and beat no one else of consequence, and a Mississippi State team that also lost to the two best teams it played.

The fact of the matter is that you start to see a drop off in performance after the 4^th ranked team, and an even bigger drop after the 6^th. Do we really want to reward these slip-ups with another chance? Do we really want to let nearly a third of top 25 teams into the playoff?

It would also make it very hard for teams to separate themselves, especially if they are able to get to 10 wins (like Michigan State did in 2014) but lose to the only good teams they played. It’s hard for me to say that that Michigan State team was deserving of competing in the playoff when compared with the teams that did make it, especially given the spectacular fashion in which they were beaten by the two best teams they played. Isn’t the point of the regular season to narrow down the field to a handful of the best teams in the country who have performed consistently all season? That’s why we play the games, and why conference depth and tough out of conference scheduling matter. You have to make a strong case in the regular season that you are one of the best teams in the country by playing against tough opponents both in and out of your conference. Expanding to an eight team playoff would potentially allow teams that are undeserving of contending for the national championship into the playoff. It would take away from the importance of regular season games if multiple two-loss teams were able to make the cut, and would further cause controversy in an already controversy-rich sport. This would be bad for the sport in the long run.

I happen to believe that (so far) the four team playoff has worked as close to perfectly as we could have hoped for in its first two seasons. Expansion seems inevitable, however, given how much money is involved and the potential windfall this is for schools that get to participate (and the TV ratings will be bananas too, if they quit putting the dang games on New Year’s Eve). But rather than expand it to eight teams, allow me to offer a modest, not-oft talked about proposal.

If the playoff must be expanded, expand it to six teams. Under this system, give the top two teams in the final rankings a bye, and set the initial games at the home sites of the three and four seeds. This will allow some of the big bowl games with rich traditions to still maintain some prestige, while also helping keep travel costs manageable for fans of the home teams (all while also providing a really awesome atmosphere for the games). The semifinal games could still be tied in with the New Year’s Bowls as they are under the current system, and we could maybe have the Championship Game cycle through those bowls as well. Don’t tie participation to conference championship performance unless you can get the conferences to agree to a clause about their champion’s final ranking and/or record. Simply give added weight to the winner of conference championship games when it comes to determining the final rankings. This allows the championship games to still mean something, and should keep bad conference champions (like the hypothetical 9-4 USC) from making the playoff and dragging down the overall quality of the playoff.

The playoff has been a great success so far in its four team format, and I hope that it continues to be. If the playoff must expand though, let’s keep the best parts of the new, current system without piling on some of the worst parts of the old, much maligned system. We did away with the BCS for a reason, and I see no reason to try and bring back what was one of the worst parts of that system. If the organizers of the playoff want to ensure that it continues to be a huge cash cow for them, they need to ensure the continued high quality of the games that are played. Expanding the playoff in a sensible way will accomplish those goals, and it’s all we can hope that they do just that.

[Image Source: Here]