College Football

Is this maybe also the space to ruminate on what the BCS and then the playoff have done to the culture of college football? I'm (just) old enough to really remember what the pre-BCS days were like (and let's be clear... the BCS was a two-team playoff and nothing more or less). There were pluses and minuses, but it was not really some top-down thing forced on the fans. As national media coverage proliferated, the fans wanted something less chaotic than bowls'n'polls. "The good old days" were often deeply unsatisfying.

I think the repercussions really only come in hindsight. You have hypercompetitive participants and bragging-rights obsessed fans, so clarity also comes with the inevitable devaluation of anything outside the path to an increasingly less mythical national championship. If there was a benefit to the BCS, it's that 1v2 is such rarefied air that there's little point in stressing if you have no shot, but just enough big teams had a shot that missing out was increasingly viewed as a failed season.

Cue the 4-team playoff, possibly the worst of all worlds. Now you have enough access that it's truly depressing if a promising season doesn't result in a playoff bid, but not enough slots for any particular number of teams to come into the postseason with hope or excitement. The rest of the bowls seem like empty consolations for what you missed rather than celebrations for what you did. I think we could see that even before NIL and portal went nuts, with more and more opt-outs.

So, IMHO bring on 12 or 16. Pushing the bubble farther down the rankings makes it damn near a statistical impossibility that the "best" and/or "most deserving" teams (whatever the hell those terms actually mean) will be left out. 12 or more teams will have officially sanctioned hope, more conferences will see a visible path to the title, even if it's blocked by a goonie-ass redneck Cerberus fresh from a KISS concert. Even teams that don't make the playoff will have relevant games deeper into their seasons, and spoilers can get more chances to ruin seasons like cockroaches pooping in your cookie jar.

Sure, almost every good team's season will end in a loss, but if the players and coaches want a chance to test themselves, then I think they'll be more happy (or at least less unhappy, LOL) with that, which is good for the sport. No mid-major basketball school turns down a 16-seed for an NIT berth, and no G5 is going to complain about playing USC in a first-round CFP game.

The bowls will probably become even more irrelevant, but that barn door was unlatched decades ago and thrown open not long after that. Nobody who still cares about them in their current state will stop now. Fun trip, extra practices, nice SWAG bag, it's all still there, and hell, the teams in those bowls now will be the ones with less insane NIL and be more likely to appreciate the experience. The area where I see potential unintended consequences is with OOC scheduling, but realignment is jerking that around already, and maybe there's something to be said for emphasizing your conference performance.

TL;DR: More playoffs = as good as we can hope for. Change my view.