It is looking increasingly more likely that the College Football Playoff is going to expand to 16 teams according to a report from Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports.
And with it, the Big Ten and SEC are on the brink of destroying college football. Let me explain. Last summer the Big Ten and SEC threatened to leave and start their own postseason tournament if they weren't granted the majority of revenue from the College Footbal Playoff. The resolution was that representatives from the 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame signed a memorandum reportedly giving the Big Ten and SEC nearly unilateral power over the format of the CFP.
But why are we giving two conferences such authority over the whole of college football? Could you imagine if the NFL gave the NFC North and AFC West ongoing power to decide the format of the playoffs because they each had three playoff teams this past season? The best teams and conferences change all the time in college football.
There is constant roster turnover with roughly a quarter of your roster graduating every year. On top of that, the transfer portal and unrestricted access on player movement have really leveled the playing field and prevented elite programs from stacking talent. In the new era of college football the best players disperse across the FBS every year looking for playing time.
Sure, we saw a generational run from Alabama fueled by arguably the greatest coach in the history of college football. And yes the B10 and SEC have dominated the recent list of national champions. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a fair share of ACC, Big 12, and Pac 12 teams that were competing every year. That was part of what made college football so entertaining. By consolidating the best teams and decision making into two conferences we are leaving the rest of college football behind.
Limited Value
Conference commissioners and TV executives have recently looked at college football's big games as a limitless resources when in reality it is a zero sum game. It isn't as simple as adding more matchups between ranked teams every season. The more prime matchups you have, the less valuable all games are.
More so, when you give teams, particularly the ones representing the biggest brands, countless chances to lose games and still compete for a national championship, games against a group of five or unranked teams are practically meaningless. I remember in 2023 watching Michigan play Bowling Green and being so invested when the game stayed close late. A loss in that game would have ended Michigan's national championship hopes. And yet this past year we watched two teams who both lost to unranked five-loss teams at home compete for the College Football Playoff National Championship. We are creating a system in which games against unranked teams are meaningless. The added value from playing in more marquee matchups has to come from somewhere, and it comes from stripping away any value from other games throughout the season.
This past weekend I saw that the top two ranked teams in men's college basketball were playing each other. I hadn't even heard that the game was on or taking place. More so, it was Alabama vs Auburn, one of the most heated collegiate rivalries. Now I'm not the most avid follower of college basketball, but could you imagine that same matchup in football not being talked about for weeks leading up to the game? A month out the talk of a potential matchup like that would dominate "Sportscenter" and "College Gameday". It would be talked about at work, on non-sports news channels, and everywhere across social media. When you give teams too many mulligans and an expanded playoff, the regular season loses nearly all meaning.
This model isn't sustainable
The two super conference system is turning college football into a minor league version of the NFL. Right now they can both exist because they are two different products. An NFL game is where you go to see the best atheltes in the world compete. College football is where you go to watch rivalries, upsets, running up the score against the Citadal in late November to help strengthen your case for making a good bowl game. College football isn't professional and thats part of the appeal. Every moment matters and watching your team score 70 points on an FCS school means something. College football is slowly losing that meaning.
We already have a two conference coast to coast football league. And they'll always have the best players and most talented coaches.
The direction were going, there is going to be a split between the Big Ten and SEC and the rest of college football. It isn't sustainable or practicle to relegate all the decision making to a minority of participants. And if something doesn't change, we might be witnessing the beginning of the end of college football as we know it.