If you’re a college football fan, and you root for a good team — that is, one of the 15 or 20 teams that have a prayer of making the playoffs — I would bet there are nine, 10, or 11 games that you don’t care much about, and then a select few that are circled on your calendar all year. These are the days that scare you months in advance, that you think about when you can’t sleep, that you worry about when your team slips by some inferior school 20-17. And I would bet that right now, when you look back on your team’s season, those games are what stick out in your mind and define your season.
And then there are the normal, unimportant rainy Saturdays when your team plays Chattanooga or Army or some other bad school, where you don’t even think much about football. That is, until a notification saying something to the effect of “bro what are we doing” or “[BAD GUYS] up 21-3 on [GOOD GUYS] at halftime as upset brews” flashes across your phone, and you find yourself dropping what you were doing, watching the game, and squirming until your team ultimately pulls it out and you get to breathe a sigh of relief — or until they don’t, and you sit, open-mouthed, before the screen.
College football is hard because you need to win both of those types of games. If you’re an Oklahoma fan, handing Texas their only loss of this past season is likely seared into your memory, but so were the subsequent back-to-back losses against Kansas and Oklahoma State that ultimately sank your season. If you cheer for Ohio State, you probably don’t remember most of the little wins, or even the big-at-the-time win against Penn State. What you do remember is the brutal 30-24 loss to Michigan on Rivalry Weekend, before a city’s worth of thronging fans in Ann Arbor. Ditto for Georgia, who ran the table but couldn’t do it against Alabama. Oregon, who beat nearly all the competition in a very good conference but got stuck against Washington, not once, but twice.
But that’s what makes the sport beautiful. In the NFL, if your team loses a game, you roll your eyes and move on, because NFL teams lose games all the time — indeed, you can probably lose seven before it begins to be a problem for your playoff chances. But in college, you can’t. Lose once, and your path to the playoff is exceedingly narrow; lose twice, and you’re out. Fans across the country have had their heartstrings tugged by the tantalizing closeness of the playoff, the one game that got away, that lost your team a shot at a national championship. For me, it’s the 42-39 loss to Pitt in 2016, and the two-score comeback to win 39-38 that Ohio State mounted the next year, either of which would’ve put Penn State in the playoff. For USC fans, it’s the devastating, one-score loss to Oregon in the Pac-12 championship game in 2020. If you root for Iowa, it was the 2015 Big Ten Championship against Michigan State, where it came down to the wire and they couldn’t get a goal line stop. Also, if you root for Iowa, I’m sorry, and I respect your dedication.
Every game matters. But next year, with the 12-team playoff, will they still? No, they will not.
A team will be able to drop a random game in October and still get in. Ohio State will be able to withstand a loss to Michigan and still make it. Georgia won’t have to beat Alabama in the SEC Championship. Oregon can lose twice to Washington and be fine. Penn State doesn’t have to crack the Michigan / Ohio State puzzle. Everyone makes it. It’s a party. With the first 12 games a shell of its former self, all the big games will be concentrated in January. It’s going to cheapen what is, unquestionably, the biggest regular season in all of American sports. Instead, people are going to watch college football the way they watch college basketball — that is, they won’t remember it exists until the tournament at the end of the season.
It’s a shame, because many of the arguments that are being used against the 12-team playoff are the same as those that were used against the four-team playoff when it was inaugurated in 2014. But that’s stupid. The four-team playoff was a necessary addition to a sport that was becoming increasingly top-heavy. It’s the best of all worlds — big enough that, unlike the BCS before, nobody genuinely deserving gets left out (usually), and small enough that it’s not filled out with two-loss teams who have already proven themselves to be losers on the field.
Get ready for an exciting season in 2024. And get ready for most of it to not matter.
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