Expanded 14-Team Playoff Proposal May Diminish NCAA Games
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00:00Yeah. Yeah. I think what you have to look at is historically, you know, they talked in advance of last week's meeting in Nashville about perhaps negotiating to guarantee four spots each in a expanded, again, playoff to 14 teams in the future.
00:21And my point in what I wrote was that that diminishes the competition. It undervalues the importance of chasing a regular season championship, which guarantees you're in, which guarantees you get a buy.
00:36If you can finish fourth and get a guaranteed position, then the games in a regular season really do matter less. I know there's a backward element of college football fans who looked at the Oregon-Ohio State game on Saturday night and said, well, both teams will still get in, so it didn't matter that much.
00:54It did matter. It mattered to winning a Big Ten championship, to getting into the field, to getting the best possible seed. It clearly mattered to the Oregon fans because you saw them all over the field.
01:04But if you do guarantee a fourth-place spot, then you're talking about regular season games not meaning as much.
01:11As I pointed out, if you went using current membership and the college football playoff rankings, the rankings from the committee since 2014 when they started this deal, the Big Ten and SEC both would have averaged four bids a year.
01:26And there would have been years when each of them, not at the same time, but years when each had so much strength that they would have gotten five.
01:34So there's no need to guarantee those four bids. You'll earn them anyway, and you'll have a more legitimate playoff if you don't assure that.