Why The College Football Playoff Needs Immediate Reform

The College Football Playoff system has failed so early, having been announced amidst fanfare, into one full of dysfunction. College football, it is to have become an epitome of revolutionary change and thus confused and frustrated everyone concerned-fans, players, and stakeholders.

Glaring and yet easily fixable defects prove that the system on which it was run totally missed the essence of competitive play and fair victory from which fans are used to getting. It’s time for an overhaul, and the solution isn’t that complex.

The College Football Playoff was designed to give the best teams a fair shot at the national title. However, this year’s first round has highlighted significant flaws in the system. As Ohio State athletics director Ross Bjork puts it, “It’s the first year, and we’ll be able to step back and take a look at everything soon enough.” While Bjork’s comments suggest that changes are on the horizon, the reality is that the system needs to be reevaluated urgently.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand when something is wrong. The present system places two teams from the most dominant conferences into an easier position than losers of their respective championship games. Oregon and Georgia can be considered examples here. These teams are thus able to gain an easier passage to the playoff system. It therefore undoes all the good work the teams had done in their championship victories. The problem gets even worse with teams entering the system without qualification but get immediately eliminated.

Problem With Automatic Qualifiers

The biggest problem with the CFP is that the top seeds from each conference are automatically qualified. This system negates the principle of fair competition and brings in a lot of imbalance. Teams like Indiana, SMU, and Tennessee, which have not competed against a stiff competition, find themselves in the playoff field. This lessens the significance of having won a place through merit.

Teams with weak schedules—the Tennessee team, for instance, had trouble against bottom-tier teams like Kentucky, Mississippi State, and Texas-El Paso—deserve less consideration than those that played against tougher teams. The system as of now favors teams more according to conference affiliation than the actual performance of the team, which is an unbalanced situation.

There is a better way forward—a plan that ensures fairness and accuracy in playoff selection. The “Hayes Plan” proposes a few simple changes that could drastically improve the system:

Eliminate Top Seeds for Automatic Qualification: Automatic qualification based on conference championships should be scrapped. Instead, teams should be selected purely based on performance and strength of schedule, ensuring that the best teams, regardless of conference, make the field.

Reseed After First Round: Redoing the playoff bracket after the first round would make sure that teams that played well in the regular season don’t get punished by an incorrect initial ranking. In this way, the system remains dynamic and responsive rather than letting teams play unbalanced matchups due to how they were seeded.

Strength Of Schedule

The first and most obvious way in which the selection process should be improved is to take strength of schedule into significant consideration when determining which teams should be included in the playoff. The current model tends to ignore the kind of opposition faced during the season, and Tennessee was one of those teams, so it should not enjoy the same kind of opportunity as those with a harder schedule.

In college basketball, teams are ranked using “quad wins,” in which games are ranked differently according to the quality of the opponent. The same principle applied to college football would mean that teams would be ranked based on their actual quality rather than win-loss record.

College football is supposed to learn from professional leagues, particularly the NFL. The NFL’s playoff system rewards regular-season performance and uses a reseeding method that makes sense. If college football wants to improve its playoff, it needs to get serious about a similar philosophy. “Bracket branding” has led to a confusing, sometimes nonsensical playoff structure that sacrifices fairness for marketing gimmicks.

There is too much at stake here—$800 million annually and potentially growing to $1.2 billion by 2026—to delay change in the playoff system. The future of college football is too important to be left in the hands of a process that is inherently flawed and arbitrary. As Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione says, “there’s a lot going on in those rooms,” but that does not explain the dysfunction today. College football must embrace reform to restore integrity to its competition.

ALSO READ | Olympic Snowboarder Sophie Hediger Dies In Swiss Avalanche Tragedy