The Case For Four

Over the last several days while I was home on Long Island for Christmas, I finally got a chance to catch up on some back issues of Sports Illustrated (it's bad, I'm like three weeks behind).  Anyway, as you know, I'm normally not one to talk about college football.  It, along with the NBA, is the mainstream TV sport that I generally stay away from.  There are a lot of reasons why, so I'm not going to get into them. 

However, college football is on a lot of people's minds right now, especially with the inaugural College Football Playoff right around the corner.  It's only in its first year, but the College Football Playoff has already created its share of controversy, awarding the fourth and final spot to Ohio State over TCU and Baylor.  And that brings me back to the Sports Illustrated thing.  In the "The Case For..." section of the magazine in the Sportsman of the Year issue, the argument was made that, controversy aside, four teams is the perfect amount for the playoff.  Frankly, I agree.

I'm going to echo a lot of SI's points here.  Mainly because I think they're correct.  I also believe, like many, that this playoff is inevitably going to be double in size.  It'll probably be eight teams by the end of the decade.  But that doesn't mean it should me.

If the BCS proved anything, it's that college football needed this playoff.  The BCS was designed to set up a National Championship Game between the two best teams.  But more often than not, there were three teams that could make a valid argument for being in that game.  And the process by which the teams were chosen was secretive, arbitrary and highly controversial. 

While well-intentioned, the BCS's problems far outweighed the positives.  It was designed to stop controversy, but only created more.  And we even had the split National Champions that everyone so much enjoyed.  The calls for a playoff became so great that this year, they finally gave in and created a four-team bracket, with the semifinals taking place at two of the New Year's Day bowls and the championship game the following Monday night.

Most, if not all, people wanted this.  There's still going to be debate and scrutiny, but I think we can all agree that this is better than what it was.  Obviously some sort of all-inclusive playoff like March Madness would be great, but it also seems somewhat impractical.  Although, that appears to be what some people want.  Because we haven't even had the first playoff yet, and we've already got the calls for increasing the field from four to eight teams.  Instead of rushing to make the change just so more schools can get a piece of the pie, let's take a step back and let this first one play out, though.

The most obvious case for expanding to eight teams is that there are five major conferences and only four teams in the playoff.  That means that, at a minimum, at least one of the five conferences will be left out of the playoff in any given year.  And that's assuming you only have a champion from each of the four remaining leagues.  If there are two SEC teams, like there was that year Alabama played LSU, then two other conferences will be left out.  Going to eight would all but assure that the five conference champions qualify, as well as three at-large selections.

But are there really eight teams worthy of playing for the national championship?  Most likely not.  Yes, there's always going to be a debate, and the difference between No. 4 and No. 5 might not be that great.  But looking for teams six, seven and eight would probably require at least one reach.  By adding those three extra teams, you're watering down the product.

Perhaps the biggest concern brought up in SI, though, was a very valid question, and it's one that would have to be considered.  If you go from four to eight teams, that's an extra round of the playoff.  To win the championship, teams would have to play three games instead of two.  But when are you playing these quarterfinal games?  Are you having them before the New Year's Day semifinals, which means Christmas week?  Are the New Year's bowls the four quarterfinals, with the semis a week later and the championship a week after that?  That would put the championship game in mid-January.

Neither one of those solutions is ideal.  While I already think there are too many bowls (do we really need the Heart of Dallas Bowl or Miami Beach Bowl?), I understand that they have significance to those who care about such things.  If you have the quarterfinal games of the playoff over Christmas, that takes the spotlight off these marginal bowl games.  Likewise, if the quarterfinals are on New Year's Day, that renders any non-Playoff New Year's bowl insignificant.  And if you were to use the existing bowls, how do you determine which one is a quarterfinal and which is a semi?  (One of the things I like the best about the Playoff is that the traditional bowls ARE the semifinals, and they'll rotate each year.)

These problems I'm sure will be worked out when/if they increase the size of the College Football Playoff to eight teams.  But they're also the logistical concerns that people who talk expansion simply don't think about.  While an eight-team College Football Playoff might sound like a great idea to some, it's not that simple.  Besides, let's give four a shot and see how it works before we start clamoring for eight.  Because four might turn out to be the perfect number.