You can say NIL or the transfer portal are ruining college football and you won’t be the only one singing that song. But by and large, college football still rings the bell for those who have always loved it.
It may not be the same – by the way, what sport is? – but the interest and the passion are still there, no matter how much they try to screw it up.
And while the expanded College Football Playoff has been great, it has presented the sport with yet another problem. It has nothing to do with byes or re-seeding brackets or who should be in and who shouldn’t. If y’all want to fight that out, go right ahead.
Since this is the first go-round for the CFP, everything is up for grabs to be discussed and dissected.
So here goes: This thing lasts way too long.
Sure, when you triple the size of the playoff, that’s going to mean things are going to happen at a different pace.
But this has moved about as fast as a glacier.
Doesn’t it seem like the first round was three months ago instead of three weeks? Can you even remember what happened in some of those games (granted, they weren’t exactly a thrill-a-minute).
There is no pace whatsoever to these games. Play, wait awhile, play again, wait even longer and then we’ll get back to you when the next games are.
And it’s about to get worse. After Texas and Ohio State play tonight, we are going to have a new president by the time the next game is played. There will be 10 more days between the second semifinal and the championship game. It won’t be a whole lot longer until pitchers and catchers report for spring training.
Before discussing the solution, let’s discuss the problem. That can be summed up with three letters. (In case you need some assistance, the first one is “N” and the second one is “F.”)
The honchos behind the College Football Playoff are so desperate to avoid going against the NFL that they have ruined the flow of what fans are accustomed to in the regular season.
It doesn’t help that the NFL completely ignores its free feeder system by putting scintillating games like Tennessee vs. Jacksonville on any day of the week it chooses and dares the American public to not watch it. It’s one thing for the NFL to go head-to-head with the NBA on Christmas Day, but to thumb its nose and the very sport that provides its future talent is a little ridiculous.
But college football allows it to happen because it runs scared of the mighty NFL. It’s good business (re: good for TV ratings) but it’s not good for the momentum/interest of the post-season.
And the deeper it goes, the more the CFP runs deeper into the NFL playoffs, which is certainly a no-win situation.
The solution is obvious to everyone who doesn’t run a major conference – get rid of the conference championship games. It may seem like blasphemy but they are simply not necessary and therefore delay the start of the CFP. That way you wouldn’t be playing the championship game on Monday, January 20 – the day everyone is still talking about what happened in the NFL playoffs.
By the way, two of the four teams in the semifinal this year didn’t even play in a conference championship game, so how significant are they anyway?
Even before the 12-team playoff, college football has stupidly been playing its premier game on a Monday night right after an NFL playoff weekend, providing a blueprint on how to have zero momentum for the biggest moment of the year.
By the way, while you at eliminating things, go ahead and get rid of Week 0, where two teams go to Ireland and everyone else watches SMU and Nevada battle it out.
There … you just picked up two extra weeks to make the CFP far more manageable and have a better flow than this how-long-until-the-next-game mentality.
In prehistoric times, the college football season ended on January 1. That doesn’t have to be the case again, but ditching Week 0 and the conference championship games could get you to the CFP final game on January 3 after the 2025 season.
January 3 is on a Saturday next year. Hmm, college football on a Saturday … what a novel concept.
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com