College Football should be expanded

College+Football+should+be+expanded

Liam Belan, Staff Writer

Sports fans across the country have marveled at the craziness of this year’s March Madness Tournament.

It has been an exciting tournament of historic proportions, such as the first-ever 9th seed versus an 11th seed to play each other in Kansas State and Loyola Chicago, and the University of Maryland Baltimore County becoming the first number 16 seed to win a game.

The basketball tournament generates excitement, revenue, and competitive games each and every March. There are always wild upsets that see unknown teams come out and compete.

Unfortunately, there is no such massive tournament to be found in college football. While college football has seen significant change recently with the implementation of its four-team playoff, that format is very straightforward, without many upsets, and it always leaves out at least one team that should have been in.

The wild combination of success and competition created by the NCAA Basketball Tournament clearly shows that the College Football Playoff should be expanded.

There is no need for a massive restructuring of the system. A potential expanded football playoff could not handle the 68 teams of March Madness, nor should it.

Football is much more grueling than basketball and less streaky — more often than not, the teams with talent will beat inferior teams. For this reason, there should not be a massive expansion to 32 or 64 teams.

But a potential eight- or 10-team playoff format would be appropriate.

Conference champions of the power five conferences (ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12, SEC) would be given automatic bids as incentive for winning during the regular season. The best non power five team would be given an automatic bid to avoid last year’s UCF controversy, and the rest would be wild card teams.

These teams could be seeded accordingly and play in either a locked bracket format or a reseeding format in which the number one seed would always play the lowest remaining seed.

There are seemingly a million bowl games these days, so each playoff game could potentially be played as a bowl — as the playoff currently is set up — or they could simply call them playoff games. Several teams would still miss out on the playoff, so the Dollar General Bowls of the world would remain and continue to feed the pockets of the NCAA.

With this, there is a chance for upsets at the very top of the college football pedestal. Sure, one could argue that two number four seeds (Ohio State in 2014 and Alabama in 2017) have won the playoff since its inception in 2014, but Ohio State and Alabama winning the national championship is nothing close to an upset.

With this system, fans might be able to witness a mid-major team beat a blue-blood, potentially capturing an audience exactly as March Madness does. The NCAA could easily implement any expanded system like this by acquiring a few more fields and adding just a few more games for top programs.

And it could easily be pitched in the NCAA’s language. More games mean more money.