Sunday, 4 a.m.
One year in, and I think we can agree on one thing about the college football playoffs.
They added too many teams.
I know, I know. For years, the popular opinion among college football fans was that is was criminal, ignorant and short-sighted to open the playoffs to only four teams. Never mind that, most years, you couldn’t envision more than three teams being a national champion. Every now and then, you could argue or as many as five.
But 12? Explain that to me: Why open the field to a dirty dozen.
Especially if one of the 12 is Indiana.
And another one is SMU.
Or Clemson. Or Tennessee.
In all, the first round of the first year of the playoffs was a dud. You had four blowouts by four home teams. The only tension was how many times the cameras were going to show Matthew McConaughey on the Texas sidelines. Personally, I prefer Taylor Swift. Sue me).
In a lot of ways, you could have seen this coming. The brackets are set up so the lower-ranked team goes to the campus of a higher-ranked one and tries to throw rocks at Goliath. Most of the time, the higher ranked team is going to win. And let’s face it: this annual tournament will only get to be fun if there is the danger of an upset.
Hey, it’s easy to second-guess the committee for its bottom four rankings. I’m sure you would have had better games if you let in Alabama and Miami and Ole Miss. But all of those teams had holes in their resumes, too. Heck, teams argued about the top four in past years. Don’t you think a lot more teams would be argue about being in the top 12.
In future years, maybe the bottom four teams will show a little more fight. Maybe the committee will pay more attention to strength of schedule (Indiana played a pitiful schedule. They shouldn't’ have been allowed to buy tickets to the playoffs). Take Alabama. All of the noise was about teams the Tide lost to. But they also clobbered Georgia. Could Indiana match that?
Personally, I think it was time to expand the playoffs. But I would have stopped with eight teams, maybe growing to 12 in another four years.
Who knows? Maybe college football will grow into it. Maybe it will eventually feel right. Maybe there will be a field full of contenders.
Just so one of them isn’t Indiana.