Stacking CFP deck would be ugly move
Blake Toppmeyer
College football columnist USA TODAY NETWORK
If you’ve played Candyland or Go Fish with a toddler, you know they rig the rules to help them win. Maybe, they haven’t learned how to lose gracefully, or they’re accustomed to getting their way. Eventually, they grow up and realize nobody wants to play with a cheater, and, anyway, games are more fun if they’re not rigged.
The folks running the SEC and Big Ten apparently never learned that. They’re acting like 4-year-olds while steering the College Football Playoff’s future, debating how they can rig the bracket to reduce their chance of losing.
It’s weak, and it’s pathetic, and, if they keep it up, they might find that the audience grew tired of their immature gamesmanship and lost interest in the product.
The 12-team playoff – a postseason format forged from a mindset of fairness and created with painstaking compromise – will last for one more season.
After this 2025 season, control of the College Football Playoff shifts into the hands of the SEC and Big Ten. Those two conferences will reshape the playoff as they see fit. Petulance guides their actions.
Playoff expansion to 14 or 16 teams is under consideration. This would be gluttonous, considering the first team left out of the 12-team bracket last season finished with four losses, three of which came against teams with a combined 21-18 record. But, many of us al-
ready made peace with the 12-team playoff serving as a pitstop en route to something bigger. So, fine. Go ahead and expand.
The more pitiful development is how the bids in this reformatted playoff would be assigned. At least half of the bids within a 14- or 16-team playoff would be reserved for the SEC and Big Ten before the season even kicks off, in one format the conferences are exploring, according to reporting by Yahoo! Sports.
The idea within a 14-team format would work like this: Four automatic bids for the Big Ten, four for the SEC, two apiece for the ACC and Big 12, one for the Group of Five and one at-large bid. Call this the 4+4+2+2+1+1 format. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
Or, in a 16-team format, tack on an additional two at-large bids for three at-large bids total.
Either format would reduce the CFP selection committee’s role in selecting the most deserving teams.
In other words, the SEC and Big Ten would begin the season knowing that, no matter how their teams fare, their two conferences would account for no fewer than 50% of the playoff bids.
And, so what if one of these conferences experienced a down year? No problemo, thanks to the built-in security blanket of preassigned bids.
What a farce.
As for teams in other conferences, well, they’d be playing Candyland against immature children demanding that their pieces be placed halfway to the finish line before the first card flips.
● Stacking College Football Playoff deck unnecessary move The incredible petulance of this plan is trumped by how unnecessary this is. The SEC and Big Ten don’t need to stack the deck to be fairly rewarded. They built the two best conferences, housing incredible programs, backed by enviable war chests. The product speaks for itself.
If a 16-team were in place last season, the SEC would have snagged six bids, based on the final College Football Playoff committee rankings, followed by the Big Ten (four), ACC (three), Big 12 (one), Group of Five (one), plus Notre Dame. In other words, bid distribution would have looked a lot like what the SEC and Big Ten mull preordaining.
The SEC and Big Ten fearing that the playoff selection committee would treat their teams unfairly without automatic bid protection bases itself in paranoia rather than reality. Historically, the committee smiles upon teams from those two leagues. The Big Ten and SEC teamed up to snag nearly 60% of the bids in the first 12-team playoff. Nothing wrong with that. They earned those spots on the field. Why are they so afraid they can’t earn a lion’s share of the bids in the future unless they jigger the rules?
● Should SEC be rewarded for its history?
An SEC acolyte might argue the conference’s history supports it receiving postseason protections. An SEC team won the national championship13 times in a 17-year span from the 2006 through 2022 seasons. Then, Big Ten teams won the last two national championships, and the Big Ten supplied half of the CFP semifinalists in two of the past three years.
The SEC’s run of dominance, in particular, proved impressive in its longevity, but the postseason in other sports rewards present success, not the history books.
The MLB playoffs don’t reserve a spot for the Yankees just because they own 27 World Series titles.
They used to prove its elitism with performance rather than demanding postseason representation based on conference affiliation, before the season started.
Hijacking the playoff seems like a reckless way to build audience. If you’re a Texas Tech, Oklahoma State or Washington State fan, why passionately engage in a sport in which power- and money-hungry leaders disrupted rivalries via conference realignment, and now the SEC and Big Ten want to manipulate the playoff, too?
These two leagues successfully seized control after threatening to collect their toys and go start their own playoff, unless everyone agrees to play by their rules.
What a shame for college football’s playoff, because games played with a stacked deck quickly become stale, as anyone who’s played Candyland with a 4-year-old knows.
