The College Football Playoffs have irrevocably changed the game of college football, and because of that, it has failed us. The failure of the College Football Playoffs is failure of the worst kind – failure masked in success and bathed in glory. Failure so stunningly beautiful that it resembles success. Failure that hides the insidious nature of its cause.
The statistics are gaudy: ESPN had a 15.2 and 14.8 rating for the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowls, respectively. That makes those two games the two most watched events in cable television history. The drama from the bowl games last Thursday made that day possibly the greatest day in the history of the sport. The unassuming, humble hero Marcus Mariota leads the west coast offensive juggernaut over the villainous current evil empire of college football and their controversial quarterback. The Ducks destroyed the Seminoles and the degree of defeat, along with Jameis Winston’s baggage and the sore loser post game behavior of FSU players, completely overshadowed the end to one of college football’s great runs. Like them or not, FSU’s 29-game winning streak, including last year’s national title, was a tremendous on-field accomplishment. Ohio State, on its third quarterback, dealt a decisive blow to the other evil empire of the college game, the Southeastern Conference, by bullying and beating Alabama. Alabama was the number one ranked team in the nation and Ohio State’s inclusion into the playoffs was controversial, to say the least.
And there is more where that came from. Next Monday, the Ducks and Bucks will play in the national championship game in the most fitting of places for the first edition of the Playoff Championship, the current Grand Palace of Failure, a magnificent football stadium that is home to Jerry Jones’ Cowboys, AT&T Stadium. Much like the playoffs themselves, the stadium is outwardly impressive, with glitz and glamour, comfort and amenities, but hollow in its essence, and empty in its core.
Are we, as fans, so drunk on the intoxication of the College Football Playoffs that we are willing to drink this ale to our demise? Will we let this sweet nectar of post-season change the game we love?
Yes.
Most assuredly, yes. Absolutely and without a doubt, yes. And why is this a bad thing?
College football is was different than the NFL and all of the other college sports. What made college football different was the emphasis on the regular season. The college football national champion – while often times controversial – was meant to be the best team of that season. We see something different in other sports, including the NFL. The Super Bowl Champion is the best team at the end of the season. One must not look further than the 2007 and 2011 New York Giants to see this. No one disputes the legitimacy of those championships, but everyone knows that the Giants weren’t the best teams in those years, particularly in 2011 when the Patriots recorded only the second undefeated regular season in the Super Bowl era. And that’s OK. That’s what the NFL is. It’s a league and sport whose championship is determined in the post-season. The only thing that matters about the regular season is getting into the playoffs. Why are Montana and Brady on the short list for GOAT status? Super Bowl wins. Why does the Super Bowl get a 46-rating and have 112 million viewers? Because the NFL is built around the Super Bowl.
The same can be said of the other college sports. March Madness is the perfect example. How much do conference championships matter in college basketball? To the teams and the conferences, a little. But to the larger national landscape, not much. They are simply pre-cursors and play-ins to the tournament. Can you name three or more of the major conference champions from last season? Probably not, unless you get paid to follow college basketball or have a ridiculously uncanny sports memory. Teams go to conference tournaments with the main goal of performing well enough to get invited to the tournament. The only teams that play with that pure desperation of desire are those that know they must win to make the NCAA tournament. Men’s college basketball is structured the same as the NFL, it’s all about the tournament and the tournament champion.
There was a day when we saw that desperation of desire, that thirst for victory, that energy of youthful competition every Saturday (and Tuesday, Thursday and Friday) in college football. Every game mattered; every single contest was an emotional and physical investment where the emotions, hopes, joy, despair, and heartache of team and fan-base alike ebbed and flowed with each play until the final signal dictated your state for the next seven days. Like an old friend moving away, that too will soon be nothing more than a pleasant memory.
Much like wishbone/triple option attack, the importance of the regular season is a thing of the past hopelessly clinging to the present. The shadow of the College Football Playoffs, on an indisputable march towards eight teams, will soon create an environment too cold for regular season relevance.
The NFL and the NCAA basketball tournaments are structured like this because of the money. We all know that. And it’s inevitable that the College Football Playoffs will grow into something strikingly similar to the NFL playoffs. In a few years, we will have an eight-team playoff. We will be talking about what commercials are shown during the Championship game. And during the regular season we’ll be talking about first-round home field advantage more than conference championships. We might even see top teams rest starters during rivalry week. The idea of making the playoffs more important that winning a conference championship or beating a rival will soon be upon us. Can you imagine a day when an Alabama fan would rather rest starters than beat Auburn? A day when an Ohio State caller wonders why they didn’t just sit all the starters against Michigan to prepare for the playoffs? We aren’t that far away. All because of the money and television audience the championship game generates. This will become more obvious when the CFP contract comes up for open bid in a decade. Networks will pay multiples of the $7.3 billion that ESPN paid and will charge advertisers hundreds of thousands of dollars. A $100 billion bid for ten years of an eight team playoff is likely come 2022 or 2023.
No way, you say? It’s already started. Those that want this kind of world have already won. Overall attendance across the Power 5 conferences is down this year. Overall attendance at Bowl games is down this year. Television ratings for bowl games not named Rose or Sugar are down. We’ve started to measure college football’s success in overnight television shares. We have a flurry of graduate students transferring during the offseason like free agents. And we had the first loser in the College Football Playoffs before the first game was even played: University of Alabama-Birmingham. If you don’t think other non-Power 5 programs that struggle to justify the costs associated with running an FBS program won’t shut down over the next decade, then devil has truly pulled his greatest trick. Not because he convinced us he didn’t exist; no, that would be making him work too hard. We’ve simply pretended like he wasn’t there, and hoped he go away. We’ve applied the Boogeyman philosophy to the devil and now it’s time to pay him his dues.
We’ve begun an irreversible journey to being just like the NFL and not much different than college basketball. And we are loving it. The NCAA is paying for family travel and making rule changes at behest of coaches. Each preview article discusses the spreads, over/unders, and parlays. College football is no longer the end product. Like the NFL, it is simply a vehicle for revenue amongst sycophantic money-making institutions (the colleges themselves, included).
But the biggest failure still looms. If Ohio State beats Oregon, they will be crowned national champions of college football, and rightfully so under our current system. But they will not be the best team of this season. They might be the best team right now, and if they win they certainly will be, but they cannot make an argument to be the best team over the course of the season. The holy grail of college football has always been an on-the-field champion. But like the holy grail, that was a mystical, elusive story told to generations of young fans as a chalice for imagination, a guiding light for those too young to understand the complexities of the college system. It’s simple: an on-the-field champion is not possible in college football. You would have to change the entire structure and system of intercollegiate athletics to achieve that. It would, in fact, cease to be an intercollegiate endeavor. You would have to blow up the entire thing. With the CFP, we’ve allowed ourselves to believe the mystics; we’ve sacrificed the joy of college football postseason conflagrations and debates for something that doesn’t deliver on the promise of salvation. No more split national championships, no more polling before bowls, no more endless debate of who the better team was in 1950. Now, it’s simply about who won the last game. There is, for sure, a beauty in that. That’s why we love the NFL. But that’s not college football, that’s not the essence of the sport we love.
We’ve given up our sport for something less than worthy. We’ve sacrificed love on the altar of money and will soon be left longing for the times of yore.
We have changed from the one American sport that crowns a champion for a season to an American sport that crowns a tournament champion. We have chosen conformity over uniqueness, money over love, and metrics over passion. Unfortunately our failure is fated. Instead of realizing our error, an Ohio State win – coupled with the performance of TCU, Michigan State, and Clemson – sparks a renewed call for an eight-team playoff. That narrative has already been seeded. An Oregon win masks our error, in the same way that evasion hides our crimes or luck covers bad decision making.
Change is inevitable, and the sport of college football is not immune to this undeniable law of nature. But changing the essence of something ought to be a conscious decision; moreover, changing something that is a collective property as college football is ought to a decision of collective conscious. The NCAA owns March Madness. Owners own the product of professional football. As taxpayers and alumni, the fans own college football. Practically, the conferences run college football. But television has now dictated the narrative and, as their business model dictates, has sacrificed the essence of college football at the altar of profit. All the while we have followed happily along, blissfully compliant with the whole process and malleable and gullible to the core. Let’s be clear, the fans must own this failure.
At least we’ve embraced failure well.
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