If you love sports talk radio, you’ve most likely heard of “The Herd” with Colin Cowherd that airs weekdays on Fox Sports 1. Colin Cowherd, who worked at ESPN before making the transition to fox has used his platform to discuss sports topics that many find interesting, mostly focusing on College Football, the NFL and the NBA. Recently, Cowherd had colleague college football analyst Joel Klatt of fox sports on his show to discuss the expansion of the College Football Playoff. The College Football Playoff should not expand to more than four teams and here's why.
The power five conferences are hungry, and sometimes they need to leave the dinner table with an empty stomach. The power five conferences which comprise of the Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12, SEC and ACC are the five conferences that house the best talent and depth in college football. Of these five conferences, four of the five have a conference championship game. Joel Klatt made a point on “The Herd” that if you expand the field past four teams, you almost guarantee that each conference champion gets a spot, which decreases the value of the regular season. Being able to leave a team that has one or two losses out that is on the border is good for the sport and makes each game that more important. For example, if you have a 9-3 USC team playing a 12-0 Stanford team in the Pac12 championship game and USC wins, do you award the playoff spot to USC even though they have three losses? What about Stanford? Do you leave them out even though their only loss was in the Pac 12 championship game? Having more than four teams gives the power conferences the comfortability that a team from their conference is most likely going to reach the playoff.
Watering down the already short regular season would create a disinterest in fans knowing that if their team wins their conference, their automatically going to be in. Another problem with it would be the how the NCAA evaluates Notre Dame. Notre Dame, which competes as an independent team in football creates a schedule that is very unique. On a continuous basis Notre dame schedules USC, Navy (who offers more of a challenge than most think with the option offense) Michigan State and Stanford to name a few. Another key thing in addition to just their schedule is their fluctuation of home and away games. Although the Fighting Irish play a tough schedule, they only play four games on the road and of those four, two of them will be played in warm environments(Texas and USC). Deciphering whether Notre Dame is a top four team is a lot easier than deciphering whether they are a top eight team just due to sheer elimination methods such as record, strength of schedule and not being in a conference, the ability to win a conference championship is out of the question. In order for college football to maintain it’s excitement it needs to stick with the four team playoff system.
