College Football Playoff’s biggest flaw is not James Madison. It’s that the CFP cannot replicate a regular-season Saturday.
Blowouts are an unavoidable part of football. They’re just more noticeable in playoffs, due to the lack of other games.
Unlike the regular season, fans cannot simply change the channel to a more competitive game if a playoff matchup becomes a rout.
The worst part about the College Football Playoff cannot be fixed. Cannot be legislated away by changing the bracket format. Cannot be solved by replacing a few folks on the selection committee.
You know why?
Because, the worst part of college football’s postseason is that it’s not the regular season. The playoff cannot mimic a fall Saturday stuffed with 50 games, including the conference tussles and the rivalry clashes that made you fall in love with this sport.
You can eradicate automatic bids from the playoff. You can tweak the selection process. You can snuff out Cinderella. And, perhaps, those are worthwhile explorations after two first-round games involving Group of Five teams spiraled into predictable blowouts.
And, still, none of those modifications would fix the playoff’s unfixable issue, that 50 games are better than four, that the regular-season rat race is superior to the bracketed conclusion.
None of those modifications would change that last year’s first-round games featured no Group of Five teams. Each of those games stunk.
Blowouts happen, including in College Football Playoff
I hate to be the one to tell you, but blowouts sometimes are going to happen in football, no matter how much tinkering you do.
Blowouts didn’t begin with the 12-team playoff. In fact, blowouts transpired at a coma-threatening rate during the four-team playoff era.
And, wouldn’t you know it, a number of blowouts transpired in the last NFL playoffs, too.
The nagging issue here, the one you can’t format-change away, is not that blowouts happen, but that there’s not another playoff game you can flip to, when one does.
In the regular season, if the ballyhooed Big Noon Kickoff game becomes a stinker, well, some team coached by a guy named Swinney is on upset alert on ESPN. Just flip the channel. If a primetime conference matchup quickly wilts into a blowout on NBC, well, try the in-state rivalry on ABC.
And when UCLA comes out of nowhere to land an uppercut on James Franklin, you scramble to your guide button to figure out what channel that game is on.
You cannot replicate that on a playoff Saturday, when a single game sucks up a 3½-hour time slot and if, god forbid, the game gets lopsided, you’re left to choose between an NFL field goal fest or a Hallmark Christmas movie.
CFP bracket is not March Madness
We’ve got to stop comparing college football’s postseason to March Madness.
You don’t love March Madness because it avoids blowouts. You love it, because when the No. 1 seed beats the No. 16 directional school by 40 points, and an 8 vs. 9 brick-fest turns out to be less fun than you’d hoped, you’re flipping to TNT, where the 3-seed is in big trouble, and you love it, because you called that upset on your bracket!
Football’s postseason will not recreate basketball’s 48 games in four days.
Football’s can’t-be-missed bonanza occurs during rivalry week in November, instead of at the end of the season. Unless you want to completely devalue the regular season and bloat the playoff to a gluttonous size, you’re simply not going to replicate that feast in the playoff.
I won’t try to tell you Notre Dame-Oregon wouldn’t have been more interesting than James Madison-Oregon, if playoff format rules had allowed the committee to choose the Irish instead of the Dukes. That probably would’ve been a better game, in a 12-best-teams parallel universe, although someone somewhere would bemoan the underdog is now the tragic omission from college football’s postseason.
Probably, Notre Dame-Oregon would have hit the spot, but I’ll also remind you the Irish once lost by 28 stinkin’ points in a national championship game.
TCU saw that postseason beatdown and, years later, said, “Hold my beer.”
Do you remember when Michigan State got whipped in a playoff game, 38 to zip? Or, how about when THE Ohio State University lost 31 to zip? You probably turned those games off. I wouldn’t blame you, because blowouts are boring, no matter whether the losing team hails from the Group of Five or from the Big Ten.
Even Nick Saban got stomped once in the playoff, and he wasn’t coaching one of those “Triple-A” teams he’s tired of watching.
Blowouts happen, folks. No amount of wishcasting or format tweaking will extinguish them. They’re more glaring in the playoff, because there’s no barnburner occurring simultaneously.
Just be thankful that when the blowouts happen in the regular season, elsewhere on your dial, Big Game James stands on the ledge, and the natives are furious, because Penn State is about to lose to 21.5-point underdog Northwestern. Quick, where’s the remote?
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s senior national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.