The point of the College Football Playoff should be to determine which college football team is the best in the nation.
To some ears, this might sound obvious. To some, it might sound reductive. But if we embrace this premise, then here is a conclusion that follows:
No team should be in a college football playoff that does not have a plausible claim to be the best team in college football.
HOW THE SUPREME COURT BROKE COLLEGE FOOTBALL
I repeat: The CFP shouldn’t be the 12 or eight or four best teams in college football — it should be every team with a plausible claim to be the single best team in college football.
There is nobody who believes James Madison University has the best college football team in the country. Likewise, it’s basically impossible to argue that Alabama’s team is the best in the country.
In an ideal system, neither of these teams would be in a college football playoff. The ideal playoff system for Division I college football would have a different number of teams each year. It wouldn’t be the 12 best teams or the four best teams. It might include teams that are probably worse than some teams that get excluded.
I want to be very clear here: I am not prescribing a playoff system for any other sport. I am not prescribing a playoff system for the NFL. I am only prescribing a playoff system for NCAA Division I football.
A defining characteristic of NCAA Division I football is that it has about 130 teams and about 12 or 13 games in a season. Obviously, each team plays only a small fraction of the whole.
For this reason, back in the old days, what made the most sense was to just focus on winning your conference — especially if you were in a top-tier conference such as the Big 10, the Pac-12, the Big Eight, or the Southeastern Conference.
But the 20th century was a century of steady centralization in American culture. Our attention was, decade after decade, increasingly centralized. Naturally, we asked a question: Who is the best football team in the country?
It’s really hard to compare Notre Dame to the Big 10 champion to the SEC champion if they never played one another and never played a common opponent.
The Bonniwell Trophy was an early stab at crowning a national champion, and Judge Eugene Bonniwell, president of the Veteran Athletes of Philadelphia, had the intellectual modesty to decline most years to crown a champion, precisely because of the ambiguity. This trophy was created in 1919, and was only “to be awarded in such years as produces a team whose standing is so preeminent as to make its selection as champion of America beyond dispute.” It wasn’t until 1924 that any team won it.
Soon, academics and writers developed mathematical systems for comparing teams that may have never faced off. Eventually, we got the Associated Press poll of sportswriters. Another wire service, UPI, came up with a competing poll — the coaches’ poll.
Often throughout the 1990s, the NCAA arranged for the top two teams in the AP and UPI polls to play each other in a national championship game, but this was an informal structure, and sometimes it resulted in a split national championship.
The history here is long and unnecessary. The necessary point here is this: The College Football Playoff should not be a prize for being one of the 12 best teams in football. It should be a crucible for us to determine who is the very best team.
This year, there are a few teams that could claim the mantle.
Indiana has the best claim. The Hoosiers had an undefeated season and beat otherwise undefeated Ohio State in the conference title game. The Buckeyes could say that this single 3-point loss doesn’t settle things and that they deserve a rematch. Notre Dame could point out that it won 10 straight games, all convincingly, after two very close, very early losses to top-10 teams. Texas Tech won the Big 12. Georgia won the SEC, losing once to Alabama, but then drubbing the Crimson Tide in the conference title game.
These are all arguably plausible claims. Maybe Oregon has a claim. Maybe Texas Tech and Ohio State don’t. I’d probably have three teams this year: Notre Dame and Georgia play each other, and the winner plays Indiana.
I propose that the size of the College Football Playoff change each year, from two teams to six. Every year, it probably would include the Big 10 and SEC champions. Then add in any other team that is undefeated. Then maybe a couple of other really good teams that had very close early losses to good opponents.
SPORTS BETTING APPS ARE WORSE THAN YOU REALIZE
You might say that “a three-loss Alabama team is better than a hypothetical undefeated Virginia team.” Maybe! But that undefeated Virginia team that won the ACC has a more plausible claim to being the best — “If we got to play the best, we could beat the best” — than does the three-loss Alabama team.
My playoff system would never happen, because some years it would just be two or three teams and just one or two games, which would mean less money. But this would be the right way to do a college football playoff.
