More Teams Needed For Major College Playoff

The four teams have been selected and fans of each are eagerly awaiting the semifinal matchups in this season’s college football playoffs for Division I-A.

Clemson, the defending national champion, joins Oklahoma, Georgia and Alabama as the four teams selected behind closed doors to take part. Conference champs Ohio State and Southern Cal were both left out but more on that later.

While having a four team playoff is certainly better than no playoff at all, the playoff still cannot be considered legit if conference champions are left out. It’s fine if you want to include more than one team from some (or all) conferences. Common sense says certain conferences are going to have more quality teams, but a conference champion deserves to be in.

Unfortunately, it appears we are stuck with this format for a few years at least. Then it seems the best we will do is to get eight teams. Once again, eight teams will be better than four but the answer is obvious in how this should all be set up.

All these playoff committee gurus (and I use that term somewhat loosely) have to do is follow the example that is already being used in all the other levels of college football. In I-AA, Division II and Division III (and even others such as NAIA and Junior College) an expanded playoff system is being used and has been utilized for a long time.

Even at the Division III level where players are not on athletic scholarship, the football playoffs are five rounds. You can’t say “it wouldn’t work” when it does work.

Of course, we all know it’s not about whether it would work. A 16 or 32 team college football playoff (32 teams would be my choice) would be the most exciting thing in athletics. I think it would immediately rival the NCAA college basketball tournament which has always been exciting to watch.

If you have a 32-team playoff, call conference champions would be in along with other teams which had quality seasons. It would also allow teams such as Central Florida the chance to take part. That’s one of the great things about the basketball tournament is that you have the David vs. Goliath matchups although I think some teams would find out Central Florida in 2017 is a little taller and stronger than David.

I don’t see it ever being expanded to 32 teams, however. Major college football is too set in its ways with the bowl system, which is still being implemented, even with a mini-playoff system.

As far as the teams who got in this year, there was really only a question to the committee of whether Alabama or Ohio State was going to get the number four spot. In the end the committee gave the spot to the Crimson Tide even though Alabama did not win the SEC or even get to the conference title game.

Ohio State, in my opinion, should have received the fourth spot. Ironically, Urban Myers’ team shouldn’t have gone in 2016 and did and should have gone this season and didn’t so in some ways it all evened out.

The team which really got shafted was USC. The Trojans also won their conference but was not even in the top six of the final rankings. It was funny to hear the committee chairman, complete with expensive suit, on TV early Sunday afternoon trying to defend the logic of all of this.

And while I am no fan of Auburn, it has to be tough for a team to defeat Georgia and Alabama, both of whom were number one at the time, and not get in. Injuries and the schedule simply caught up with Auburn in the end.

While most college football fans are eager for the four-team playoff to begin in a few weeks, I have already been following the playoffs at the other levels. These divisions have had it figured out a long time.

Monticello native Chris Bridges is a long-time newspaper columnist. He welcomes feedback from readers of The Monticello News at pchrisbridges@gmail.com.