The 12-team College Football Playoff did what it was designed to do
On frauds, hypothetical wins, bad losses, and the search for more money
Since its inception, the sport has involved unscrupulous figures, myth-makers, charlatans, and rule-breakers all getting their taste of the large sums of money surrounding college football.
The days of hundred-dollar handshakes and suitcases full of cash for players are largely over as NIL has brought those payments a bit more into the light. But even in the days before that and the transfer portal introduced free agency, it would be a mistake to think of college football as anything other than a commercialized and professionalized game designed for profit maximization played under the guise of amateur intercollegiate competition.
“When two colleges, both distant from New York City, and with combined resident alumni that would scarcely fill a section of the Polo Grounds, elect to play there, are they doing so for the education of their undergraduates or for the greatly increased receipts?” a Nov. 25, 1936 letter to The New York Times reads.
Eighty-nine years later, the college football season began in the absurdly named Week 0 with Georgia Tech upsetting Florida State in Dublin, Ireland. Four months, 27 days after that, the season ended with Ohio State beating Notre Dame in its newest, grandest crown jewel: the College Football Playoff National Championship game in Atlanta.
The playoff, which expanded from four teams to a dozen for this season, was first introduced in its smaller form because fans had grown tired of the old ways of determining champions: voters selecting a champion in a system that used to have no title game and, after that, a computer deciding the two teams that would meet in the BCS National Championship Game. Bowls at the end of the year were fun, pitting rival conference champions against each other was tradition, but a true champion needed to be crowned.
The playoff system succeeded over the past ten years because there was at least no possibility for multiple teams to be able to claim with a straight face that they were the true national champions.
But the playoff did not eliminate debate. It shifted the conversation from after the games were played to throughout the regular season. From who was best to who belonged among the best.
Because of the size of college football – 67 teams in the so-called Power Four conferences alone – and the game’s inherent unevenness – from the scheduling of opponents to the disparity in schools’ budget for facilities and coaches to the boosters’ purse size for funneling money to players and to the biases in determining preseason rankings – there are always going to be football haves and have-nots and teams people believe to be inherently more deserving than others based on hypothetical matchups that never become reality.
And in the year of the first 12-team tournament, one word came to dominate the conversation: Fraud.
Indiana, winners of 11 games for the first time in the school’s 138-year history of playing football and losers of just one (at Ohio State in mid-November) didn’t have enough quality wins to make it. Then they were swamped at Notre Dame in the opening round and it was confirmed: Frauds.
Boise State, winners of 12 games and losers of just one (at undefeated Oregon in early September) and with a 2,000-yard rusher and Heisman Trophy runner-up in the backfield, didn’t have nearly enough talented players to compete with the teams from power conferences. Then they got beat down by Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl. Frauds.
SMU and Clemson, both out of the ACC, both lost as road underdogs by double digits in an opening round that didn’t see a single close contest. Frauds.
Alabama, Ole Miss, and South Carolina, all of the powerful SEC were left out of the field despite their wins over several top teams. Their response to it all: Fraud.
The Crimson Tide, who made the four-team playoff in eight of 10 years and won three titles, were the highest-ranked team on the outside looking in. But of their three losses, two came in road games at lowly conference foes that finished 6-6. Frauds.
The debate is a feature of the enterprise and not a bug. Before the final rankings came out on Dec. 8 there were five weekly updates of what the 12-team field would be had the season ended at that moment. Time for more debate, more eyeballs, and more hand-wringing over ever-changing criteria for entry into the field: strength of schedule vs. strength of victory vs. quality of losses vs. strength of conference. Whatever argument would work that week was the new best argument.
The 12 teams were eight in time for the traditional New Year’s Day bowl games with the names even the casual American sports observer recognizes. But that round saw just one close game – Texas, playing out of the SEC for the first year, eeked out a double-overtime win over Arizona State, playing in the Big 12 for the first year – and three more blowouts.
The new system failed to produce more than one compelling battle in its first eight goes, but the new system worked.
It did everything it was designed to do: created excitement, created talking points, created controversy, created must-win games, created underdogs, created villains, and then, at the end of a season in which there were 47 bowl games – including the 11 playoff games – played over five weeks, crowned a champion.
“Have we Rose Bowls and Sugar Bowls, soon to be followed undoubtedly, by a variety of other bowls, just for the encouragement of amateur sport or for the enrichment of everyone concerned but the [players]?” the same New York Times letter from 1936 said.
Most importantly: The 12-team playoff made money.
The game has changed, the game has stayed the same.
But did it make enough? Were there still dollars left on the table? What if next year or the year after teams like Alabama, Ole Miss, South Carolina, and, why not, Miami, too, can be included?
Sixteen has a good ring to it. Surely there will be no debate then.
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives and works in New York.