Almost 15 years ago exactly, college football reached the height of discontent with the Bowl Championship Series and paved the way for an entirely brand new postseason.
It was the first Saturday in November 2011. LSU had just beaten Alabama, 9-6, in an overtime game in Tuscaloosa that was ferocious and dramatic and supposedly definitive in terms of the national championship picture.
LSU won, Alabama lost, and that was supposed to be that.
But two weeks later, Oklahoma State — the team that had risen to No. 2 in the rankings — lost a double-overtime shocker at Iowa State. The circumstances of the game were noteworthy. When Oklahoma State’s players woke up that morning, they learned that a plane crash the night before had taken the life of two Oklahoma State women’s basketball coaches, prompting some discussion about whether the game should be postponed. And then as the game played out, kicker Quinn Sharp attempted a go-ahead field goal that went straight over the upright with 1:21, missing by such a narrow margin that players who were on the field that night still argue to this day that officials got the call wrong.
Despite the asterisks attached to that result, the loss was punishing enough for Alabama to end up back at No. 2 in the BCS rankings by the end, edging out Oklahoma State by mere fractions.
For years, critics had pummeled the BCS for excluding teams that had done enough to deserve their shot at a title. BCS defenders argued that what made college football unique was the urgency of the regular season, where each week was akin to a playoff. The argument went on for more than a decade.
But when the 2011 season ended with an all-SEC rematch, passing over an Oklahoma State team that barely lost an overtime game played hours after a campus tragedy, the tide started to turn. If the sanctity of the regular season mattered so much, why did LSU need to beat Alabama a second time? Why was Oklahoma State getting screwed over by a computer formula that nobody really understood? Outside of the SEC, everyone else in college football was furious.
When Alabama won a 21-0 snoozer in the title game, the BCS’ fate was sealed. The morning after the championship, commissioners from the Football Bowl Subdivision met in New Orleans and began paving the way for a brand new postseason.
Shortly thereafter, the College Football Playoff was born. It was a big step but also an incremental one, intentionally capped at four teams because inside the room, decision-makers understood that while the way their sport crowned a national champion needed to change, the sport fundamentally did not.
At a meeting in April of 2013, where many of the key CFP details were being ironed out, executive director Bill Hancock made it clear that presidents and commissioners “have no desire” to go beyond four teams. The ethos in the room was clear: Move slowly, be careful, don’t break what isn’t broken.
So if you’re wondering how, in the span of a dozen years, we went from that to the 24-team playoff monstrosity that was reportedly nearly done on Thursday, you’re asking the right question.
How did we get from that to this?
With every change to college football’s postseason — from the traditional bowls to the Bowl Alliance to the BCS to the four-team CFP to the 12-team CFP — you can look back at a moment where public opinion soured on the previous format and the sport’s leaders were forced to react.
This time, they’re giving fans something hardly anyone has asked for. And it comes with trade-offs that could fundamentally change the core product in harmful ways.
Even though the 12-team playoff has worked as intended, preserving the delicate balance between access and exclusivity, blowing it all up after just three years to double the size of the field was not inevitable. It was a choice first championed by Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, a Harvard-educated lawyer-turned-TV executive who spent much of his career in Major League Baseball and has demonstrated little interest in college sports outside of how much money can be extracted from it.
Which is, of course, part of the business. College sports are professional sports now, and money has never been more of a factor in every decision that tears away the fabric of what used to be.
In this case, the point of more playoff games is not merely the TV money that will pour into the coffers of the Big Ten and SEC. It is a concession to the pressure many power conference schools are feeling when it takes $30 or $40 million just to field a competitive roster. How can schools in the middle of the power leagues justify that investment, year after year, if playoff spots are too precious and the decaying bowl system is no longer an adequate reward?
If you think about it, the reason the bowls/BCS endured for so long was that everybody got a trophy. A team here or there getting snubbed from the BCS title game wasn’t worth blowing up the utopia of the masses.
Though bowl games were invented to juice the winter time economies of travel destinations and eventually became a symbol of grift and waste, BCS defenders got one thing right: The moment you introduced a playoff, it would inevitably grow because fewer people would be happy in the end. Ever since, the most important decisions in college football have been dictated by FOMO.
When you go back to the beginning and trace the entire arc of how we ended up here, it all makes sense. As much as you may disagree with the conclusion, it is all logical.
But for the first time in this transformation of college football’s postseason, this evolution comes with tradeoffs. Big ones.
Sure, the conference championship games had gotten stale and won’t really be missed. The bowl system was decaying on its own with more and more players opting out, so killing it off isn’t that big of a deal. You can even find some positives in your typical Pop-Tarts Bowl matchup now being converted to a first-round playoff game.
Why expanded playoff is so detrimental
Those things aren’t going to fundamentally change college football.
Here’s what will: When Missouri plays at Ole Miss on Saturday, everyone watching the game in the stadium and on television will understand that the loser probably won’t make this year’s CFP. That’s a really big deal. Sports are the best reality show on earth, and most of the time they rise to the level of the stakes. That’s why when you watch an NBA game on a Wednesday in February and compare it to a first-round playoff game in April, they look completely different.
Human beings respond to urgency. You cannot create it where it doesn’t exist.
In a 24-team playoff world, there will be no urgency in a Missouri-Ole Miss game in October, nor in the BYU-Notre Dame game this weekend, nor for Ohio State desperate to avoid a second loss at Indiana.
College football stakeholders understand that. They are simply betting that fans are so hooked on the product that they won’t care in any of the ways that hurt their bottom line.
They may be right, or they may be spectacularly wrong. We’ll see. But there’s no debating how dramatically and suddenly they’re changing the sport, and the question is whether the juice is going to be worth the squeeze.
Will the extra playoff money cure the budget disasters at power conference schools who are spending beyond their means? Will more playoff spots satiate the appetites of the sport’s middle class that just watched Indiana leapfrog over them? Will a few years of first-round playoff losses make a fan base any more satisfied with its coach than your typical 8-4 team is now?
If not, we’ll be back here in another few years trying to figure out how to stuff a few more teams into the already bloated postseason. And at some point, we may look back and realize that throwing the 12-team playoff era in the trash after just three seasons caused more problems than it solved.