As support grew for the College Football Playoff to expand from 12 to 24 teams, money was not the main factor.
Yes, the new five-year, $1.7 billion deal finalized Monday will add a few million for each school in the SEC and Big Ten and a lesser amount for everyone else. But replacing conference championship games with a series of first-round playoff games was not, in and of itself, a big enough prize pool to blow up the entire sport and risk losing the sanctity of the regular season.
Advertisement
What was worth it? Access. As coaches and administrators have experienced the 12-team playoffs, they have come to the conclusion — and probably rightly so — that nothing resonates with fans more than getting on the field. They increasingly considered their own job security tied to the black-and-white standard of getting in or out, so they simply changed the standard to include many more programs stuck in the middle of the two richest conferences.
But will increased access to the playoffs really quell the “fire for everyone” culture that seems increasingly pervasive in college football? Here’s a prediction: It will make the situation much worse.
Although the coaching carousel got off to a slow start this year, business is picking up with four power conferences opening and several more that could come to fruition in the coming weeks. The real surprise, though, is how many first-year coaches are already under pressure.
Michigan’s Kyle Whittingham, California’s Tosh Lupoi, Washington State’s Kirby Moore, Colorado State’s Jim Mora and Tulane’s Will Hall have been so disappointing in year one that it wouldn’t be a shock if their schools pulled the plug and started over. Even at places like Arkansas and Florida, where the record is no different than expected, first-year coaches have a hard time convincing fans they’re on the right track.
Traditionally, firing a coach after one year was taboo, unless there was an off-field scandal. Although it was immediately clear to university administrators that they had hired a coach who was in over his head, it was almost too embarrassing to admit such a mistake without at least two years of on-the-ground evidence.
Advertisement
But if that culture actually changes and reduces the time it takes for coaches to prove themselves, the 24-team playoffs will be like throwing kerosene on a bonfire.
If you thought the 12-team playoff created a world of FOMO for everyone who didn’t get in, just wait until two-thirds of Power Conference schools realize every November that they landed on the wrong side of a pass-fail test.
When the level is really high to make the playoffs, you can at least justify not making it. Even now, in the 12-team version, last year we saw good teams like Texas, Notre Dame and Vanderbilt fail because there wasn’t enough room and the margin for error was low. If you didn’t make it to the cut line, you were in good company.
So when you change the threshold so drastically, you of course include more teams worth drawing. But you’re also creating a new standard for what constitutes a successful season. It’s inevitable that starting next year, fans and promoters will consume college football in a much more binary way: You’re either in or you’re out, and it’s a big deal if you’re out.
Advertisement
At the same time, college football is experiencing a revolution in the Overton Window as to what kind of season is acceptable for a new coach. Previously, the first year was free. Especially in programs that had been losing for a few years, results didn’t matter. All you had to do was show that you had changed the culture of the locker room, be a little more competitive than the last coach and ensure a good recruiting class to keep the fans happy.
Those days are over. Although Curt Cignetti taking Indiana to the playoffs in year one and winning a national title in year two is the extreme example, he is far from the only one to use the transfer portal to make an immediate turnaround. When fans see Bob Chesney take UCLA to 9-0, Will Stein put Kentucky in the CFP mix, Eric Morris win quickly at Oklahoma State with players he coached at North Texas, and James Franklin put the best Virginia Tech team on the field in nearly a decade, everyone has the right to ask, “Why not us?”
If you’re trying to understand what’s fueling so much anger right now at a place like Florida, which is 5-4 and hasn’t been bad overall in Jon Sumrall’s first year, look no further. Under a traditional timeline, Florida fans would generally agree that Sumrall needs time to rebuild the program after five straight mediocre (or worse) seasons and wouldn’t start making any judgments until year three.
But now that it’s proven to you can returning any program in a year becomes an expectation. No one can afford to play the long game anymore. At 5-4 with wins against Texas and Ole Miss, Sumrall is not in the hot seat and is largely doing well. But will discussions about his job security move from the online world to the real world if he’s not on track to make the 24-team playoffs this time next year?
Advertisement
You can set your watch with this.
The collision of these two factors – the expansion of the playoffs and the recent track record of winning coaches in the first year – will inevitably accelerate any conversations fans have when they start to wonder if they have the right guy. And as we see every year across the country, prohibitive finances are no match for administrative self-preservation.
For weeks, Florida State officials insisted they wanted to bring back Mike Norvell, largely because his roughly $50 million buyout posed such a problem. When the noise became loud enough, the school president relented. We could see the same thing start to happen at Nebraska, where Matt Rhule signed a new contract last year with a $63 million buyout, but now finds himself at the center of a fan mutiny after losing four straight games.
Advertisement
These are not healthy developments, but Newton’s third law of motion always wins out in the end. For every action (massive coaching contracts, playoff expansion, free-for-all transfer portal), there will be an equal and opposite reaction (new expectations, more pressure, less patience to build from the ground up). The old rules no longer apply.
But there is a real problem with what they did here. Out of 24 teams, there will always be more losers than winners at the end of every college football season; only now it will make the line between the two even clearer. Everyone will feel even more pressure to place themselves on the right side of the divide, because it will be considered unacceptable to not measure up.
There are many reasons why it makes sense to expand the playoffs. Increased parity means more than 12 teams deserve a chance, donors are being asked to pour $40-50 million into teams without enough playoff rewards and there was no way to save the bowl system given all the attention on the CFP. Conference championship games had also become obsolete since realignment allowed the formation of 16- and 18-team mega-conferences. So it makes sense to replace them with first round playoff matches.
But if coaches and administrators think that a team qualifying for the playoffs as a No. 22 seed will spare them from the “fire everyone” culture they seek to tame, that will prove to be an illusion. And if God forbid miss After the 24-team playoffs, they will soon get a lesson in unintended consequences.
Gn headline
