There are a lot of problems with sports these days. I like coming up with solutions that will never happen for those problems. I tried to fix college football in general three years ago. Of course, things have just gotten worse since that blog post. So I’m not going to try to fix the entire sport, but I am going to try to fix college football’s postseason.
The 12-team playoff is here and I hate what it’s done to college football’s regular season. Oregon and Ohio State played the biggest game of the regular season and it meant nothing. Ohio State lost that game and they lost to a bad Michigan team and they still made it to the College Football Playoff. Notre Dame had one of our worst losses ever, but we still made the College Football Playoff. Of course, I’m happy with Notre Dame being in the playoff, but I am perfectly fine with the idea of college football being a sport where losing to Northern Illinois ruins your season. So yeah, I’m opposed to the 12-team playoff, but it’s not going away (if anything, it will expand further) so I’m going to try to make the postseason better.
The easiest problem to fix is the seeding. Boise State and Arizona State were ranked 9th and 12th, but they got the 3 and 4 seeds because they were conference champions. With all the stupid conference realignment we’ve seen over the last couple of decades, it was entirely predictable that something like this would happen. Because of the stupid seeding, the 5 and 6 seeds have easier second round opponents than the 1 and 2 seeds. It sounds like they’re going to fix that problem. Guarantee spots for five conference champions, but just seed the 12 teams in the order that they’re ranked. It would also make sense if they reseeded after each round, but I can live with not reseeding if the seeds make sense.
Another problem is the calendar. The football calendar and the academic calendar do not line up in a convenient way, especially when it comes to the transfer portal. Players are leaving their teams to enter the transfer portal before the season is over. One of the many things I love about college football is having games on Saturdays. But with the playoff going deep into January, they lose Saturdays to the NFL. The playoff started with the first round split between a Friday night and Saturday. That was excellent. The second round is New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Of course this year, that’s a Tuesday and Wednesday, but that’s fine because people will be off and New Year’s Day is college football’s traditional holiday. But then we have problems. The semifinals are on a Thursday and Friday. Friday night is fine, but if Notre Dame wins the Sugar Bowl, we will be playing in the Orange Bowl on Thursday, January 9. I absolutely hate the idea of having to go to work both the day of and the day after a Notre Dame football game (it was pretty weird working the day we played Indiana, but that was okay because it was a half day and then I was off for two weeks). And then the Championship Game is on a Monday night. The Monday night championship game has been a problem for a long time. This year it’s Martin Luther King Day. So it’s cool that the championship game is on a holiday, but it’s not cool that the next day is a work day. But if Notre Dame makes it, I am absolutely taking that Tuesday off.
Anyway, I think we can fix the calendar issue. First of all, get rid of conference championship games. Conferences are stupid to begin with and conference championship games have gotten especially stupid now that conferences have ridiculous numbers of teams and they’ve done away with divisions. Like you can end up with three-way ties and no logical way to break the ties (because so many teams in the same conference don’t play each other). With divisions, you played everybody in your division and having the best team from each division play in a championship game made some sense. But look at the Big 10 this year. The Big 10 had four good teams: Oregon, Penn State, Ohio State, and Indiana. Ohio State played the other three. Penn State and Indiana only played Ohio State. Anyway, Oregon and Penn State played in the championship game. If they just didn’t play the game, what would have been different? Oregon still would have been the 1 seed in the playoff. Maybe Penn State would have been the 5 seed instead of the 6 seed. Who cares? The game meant nothing. Conference championship games also made a little more sense when only four teams made the playoff, but this year we had Ohio State, Indiana, and Tennessee all make the playoff without playing in their conference championship games. We don’t need the conference championship games (especially if they’re fixing the seeding so that they’re not determining byes anymore). Just get rid of them. Besides conference championship games being stupid, I want to get rid of them so that we can start the College Football Playoff the first weekend in December. The second round would be the second weekend. The semifinals would be the third weekend. And then the championship game would be January 1. Then you could play all the games on Friday/Saturday in the first three rounds, January 1 would once again be the most important day of the college football postseason, and everything would be done before the spring semester starts which would help with handling players transferring.
One thing that people seemed to like about the first round was having playoff games on campus. I remember Mike Francesa saying years ago that one reason that there wouldn’t be a playoff is that it would mean a lot of traveling for fans and selling tickets would be an issue. Like if you’re an Oregon fan, you’re looking at having postseason games in Pasadena, the Dallas area, and Atlanta if Oregon makes it to the championship game. How many fans can go to more than one of those games? So the 8 seed gets to play a home game, but the 1 seed only plays neutral site games (of course they do get a bye in the first round). I would have the first two rounds on campuses. So what happens to the bowls? Hold on, I’ll come back to that.
Another idea that I’ve seen that I’m on board with is creating a football version of the NIT. Why not? It’s no crazier than having all these bowl games that mean absolutely nothing. They would be more interesting to watch if they had another tournament where they were playing for something. So I would have a 12-team tournament for teams not in the college football playoff. Any conference that didn’t have a team in the college football playoff would be guaranteed a spot. So here’s what it could have looked like this year:
Byes:
1 Alabama
2 Miami
3 Ole Miss
4 South Carolina
First Round
5 BYU vs. 12 Jacksonville State (Conference USA)
6 Iowa State vs. 11 Marshall (Sun Belt)
7 Missouri vs. 10 Ohio (MAC)
8 Illinois vs. 9 Army (American)
So the NIT would have the same format as the playoff (and you could expand both tournaments up to 16 teams and the format and scheduling still works fine). The first two rounds are on campuses. The final game of the NIT would be on either December 31 or January 1 also as the undercard for the National Championship Game.
So what do we do with the bowls? Well, if the College World Series can always be in Omaha, the National Championship Game in college football can always be in Pasadena. The Rose Bowl is the National Championship Game on January 1 every year (or January 2 if January 1 is a Sunday). The Rose Bowl has the most history and tradition. And if we’re not going to play the championship game in cold weather, give me outdoors and on grass in a beautiful setting any day over an NFL stadium, indoors, and/or on artificial turf. What happens to the Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, and Peach Bowl? I would have them in a rotation. Each year one of them would be the championship game for the NIT on December 31 or January 1 before the Rose Bowl, two of them would be the College Football Playoff semifinals, and two would be the NIT semifinals. As for the lower level bowls, I would still have as many as possible, but some would probably have to die. Looking at the system I just came up with, the only teams ranked in the playoff committee rankings who wouldn’t make the College Football Playoff or NIT would be Syracuse, Colorado, UNLV, and Memphis. So the lower level bowls are not going to be all that interesting, but they’re already mostly not very interesting. If we lose some, that’s fine. Like how many bowl games do we need in the state of Alabama? How many bowl games need to be played at Camping World Stadium in Orlando? Right now there are three bowl games played in Alabama and three played at Camping World Stadium. Do we really need that many in those places? There are a few bowl games that I would not want to lose: the Hawaii Bowl on Christmas Eve, the Holiday Bowl in San Diego, the Pinstripe Bowl in Yankee Stadium, (I like football in Yankee Stadium), Pop-Tarts Bowl for their creative marketing, etc. I would want some others as well just to have football on TV during the week in late December. But if we don’t have the 68 Ventures Bowl (that was an actual bowl game this year, not something I made up) anymore, that’s fine. The games that really matter would be played on Fridays, Saturdays, and January 1. The bowls that are left over would be used to fill in the weekdays between the semifinals and the championship games.
I think this would make college football’s postseason better and more interesting than what we have right now. And the schedule would make a lot more sense. The schedule we have now is better than it once was. One of the things I always thought was silly was the ridiculously long gap between the end of the regular season and the big bowl games. Before the Big 10 had a championship game, the 2006 Ohio State team finished the regular season by beating Michigan on November 18 and then they didn’t play again until they played in the National Championship Game on January 8. My idea would take us right from the end of the regular season to the playoff and we’d end the season on January 1.
How would all of this affect Notre Dame? I think there would be some good and some bad. Notre Dame had 40 players take a final the day before we played Indiana (I’m sure most of the SEC would laugh at that idea). Moving up the playoff calendar would mean that Notre Dame’s players would be dealing with academics and football for the first three rounds of the playoff instead of just the first round. But it might help with transfers coming to Notre Dame. Let’s just say Texas makes it to the National Championship Game on January 20. Their players have five days after that to enter the transfer portal. But Notre Dame’s spring semester starts on January 13. Is the football team able to get somebody into school for the spring semester who goes into the transfer portal like 10 days after the spring semester started? I would think the answer is that they would probably have to wait until the summer to get him into Notre Dame.
Of course, this is another one of my ideas that won’t happen. The biggest thing for me is keeping Saturday and January 1 as the biggest days in college football. If they could figure out a way to get the championship game on a Saturday, I’d be good with that, but that seems unlikely with NFL playoff games. Maybe a more realistic option would be moving the championship game to a Friday night. That would be a million times better than playing it on a Monday night. Having the championship game on a Monday night is probably my least favorite thing about college football other than Michigan.
Anyway, the second round starts today. And if Notre Dame wins, that means we’ll be playing in the Orange Bowl on my birthday. That would make this birthday either my best birthday ever or my worst birthday since I had to go back to work after losing to Alabama in the championship game 12 years ago. Many weeks ago, I was talking with my college friends about how we had such a wide range of possibilities. I thought that we could lose in the first round if we got a bad matchup. Fortunately that didn’t happen. I also thought we had a chance to make a very deep run. I wouldn’t say that I expect to beat Georgia, but I think we have a much better chance to win this game than we had to beat Clemson in the playoff in 2018 or Alabama in the playoff in 2020. If you want to get to where you want to go, you have to win a game like this. Clemson’s win over us in 2015 and Georgia’s win over us in 2017 helped get those programs to another level. This game is an opportunity for us to do that.
Go Irish! Beat Bulldogs!
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