Sunday, May 6, 2012

Why a 4 Team College Football Playoff is a Terrible Idea

I'm not going to describe the series of events that has gotten us to a 4 Team college football playoff.  If you found my blog you already know about it as well as the myriad of potential versions there are for a 4 Team model.  A 4 team playoff will only make the rich conferences richer and the poor conferences poorer and, much like Barack Obama, will completely kill the middle class.  A 4 team model means that at most 4 conferences are represented in the playoff.  With the demise of the WAC there are now 10 conferences left which means at least 6 of them will not get to participate and will receive no, or considerably less, revenue than those conferences who put a team in the playoff.  In the BCS model we had 6 elite conferences but realignment has left one of those leagues, the Big East, a shadow of its former self and dropped the conference from the ranks of the truly elite.  That leaves us 5 elite conferences and only 4 spots so one of the elite leagues will get left out each year.  Furthermore, one of those 5, the ACC, while having strong, profitable schools in its league has struggled in the BCS era, notching only 2 victories and only 1 at-large berth which went to an undeserving Virginia Tech team last year.  If the ACC struggles to put a team in the new playoff system some of the bigger programs are going to grow concerned that they are going to be cut off from all of the playoff money and may look to jump to a conference that is more likely to land a team in the playoffs on a yearly basis.  The Big 12, with only 10 members is stalking the ACC like a predator, waiting for the first sign of weakness the league shows.  They could jump in and grab schools like Florida St, Clemson, Virginia Tech, and Miami and the rest of the league would be powerless to stop it.  Much like the Big 12, the money hungry $EC wouldn't wince at the opportunity to add more tv markets in a populous state like North Carolina and a school like NC State could easily be separated from its collapsing conference.  They would need a 16th school and would probably give Virginia Tech a counter offer to their Big 12 invitation.  A raid of the ACC would lead to another realignment cascade where the ACC raids the Big East (for the 3rd time in this millennium), the Big East survivors--if they are even still under the Big East banner--raid C-USA and possibly the MWC, those conferences in turn raid the Sunbelt or an FCS conference, etc.  Meanwhile we could potentially have a similar ripple effect among non-football conferences if their is a split in the Big East between the football and Catholic basketball factions.

I'm not saying that another round of radical realignment propelled by the pursuit of profit is eminent, I'm just saying that it lays the foundation for yet another Darwinian, eat-or-be-eaten game of conference musical chairs...

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