CFP won’t be adding teams anytime soon … whether they should or not

As the latest round of wailing about the number of teams that make the College Football Playoff continues, it really doesn’t matter what coaches, athletic directors, media or fans really think.

It’s not going to change until after 2026 … if it changes then.

What should change, however, is completely in the hands of the conferences. Bill Hancock or anybody else has never publicly said it, but the playoff was originally a culmination of how the conferences settled things.

Again, whether you, me or anybody else likes it or not that’s the way it is.

It’s not the playoff that should change, but the way conferences decide their champions each year. Don’t throw Central Florida out there, either.

They’ve beaten one real team in two years and that was Auburn in the Peach Bowl last year, who really wasn’t too interested in playing the game. Okay, they won a bowl game over the most dysfunctional program in college football that had just blown a conference championship game against a team they stomped a month earlier.

If you’re not in a Power 5 conference you aren’t good enough to be in the playoff.

The Big 10 and the Big 12 play nine conference games each season. Every other conference should play that many games … minimum.

Alabama’s Nick Saban agreed with that, by the way, plus he added that SEC teams shouldn’t be allowed to play teams from non-Power 5 leagues.

If every Power 5 league adopted that, then the entire college football season would be a much better season-long playoff than it is now. Yes, every week matters in college football, which is part of the intrigue over the season.

To be honest, part of what made college football increase in interest over the last 50 years was the bowl system that produced legitimate multiple champions at times.

It wasn’t that complicated.

Alabama’s Bear Bryant decided where he was taking the Crimson Tide and everything else fell into place.

The Big 10 and Pac 8 had the Rose Bowl, the Southwest Conference champion hosted the Cotton Bowl, and it was lobbying and jockeying for the best bid to increase your chances of winning the championship.

Things changed a little in the mid-1970’s when the SEC locked up a spot in the Sugar Bowl and the Big 8 made a deal with the Orange Bowl.

That setup worked over and above all of the wailing and screaming for a college football playoff (see, this isn’t new). In a way it was a playoff and there were a lot of people that thought having people arguing an entire off-season over the final poll results was good for college football … and it’s hard to argue the results, both in interest and money.

Then came the Bowl Championship Series in 1998, which lasted until 2014. There were years where fans of certain schools thought they were jobbed in the final polls, so you had six months of arguing again.

Now we have a four-team playoff.

And, once again, there is caterwalling among fans and the media that they need to expand from four teams, which means you reduce conference championship games to the point of being exhibitions.

If you have an eight-team playoff without requiring any sort of conference championships, then you’re going to see teams basically playing like NFL teams that have locked up home field throughout those playoffs.

No, college football doesn’t need more teams in the playoffs. It certainly doesn’t need teams from non-Power 5 leagues there. All that will do is dilute the product because there are reasons they aren’t in the big boy conferences.

Lowering standards lowers the quality of the entire product.

If the Power 5 conferences decide to go to a nine-game schedule and not schedule the junior varsity teams, then you’ll see a 14-week playoff with two bye dates.

The television money will go up because viewership increases. If you don’t believe that go look at the television ratings for games against junior varsity teams and it’s so low they can’t give away advertising on it (they bonus advertisers from the highly-viewed games).

Expanding the college football playoff won’t be happening soon. Look at the history and the guess is nothing is going to change there until at least 2027.

A better way is improve the regular season schedule and quit playing games against the junior varsity schools in non-Power 5 leagues.

It’s all a numbers game.

With dollar signs in front.