There has been much conversation and consternation lately over the expansion of both the College Football Playoff and NCAA Tournament.
Judging by the reactions of fans and pundits alike on social media, the decision to expand the fields of both postseasons in the “money sports” of college athletics has been met with nearly universal disgust.
While the NCAA Tournament has officially ballooned to 76 teams, the CFP committee and powers that be are discussing opening their field to a 24-team playoff.
Both of these are gross to anyone who is a fan of tradition in college sports (as you are aware, I am one of them), but, in my opinion, one of these is clearly worse than the other.
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Yes, expanding the NCAA Tournament (yet again) is a slap in the face to fans everywhere and a blatant money grab, but it doesn’t come close to how catastrophic a 24-team College Football Playoff would be to the sport of college football.
In the end, it’s a numbers game.
March Madness going from 68 to 76 teams represents a roughly 12% increase in teams added to the field, hardly a drop in the bucket for an already-bloated postseason tournament.
When you compare that to the 100% increase a 24-team College Football Playoff would represent, we aren’t even talking about the same game anymore.
The regular season in college football also has way fewer games than college basketball’s regular season, and, as my colleague Ian Miller pointed out, a 24-team field would just dilute a once-great regular season more than it already has.
It’s a zero-sum game. If the College Football Playoff expands, the urgency of the regular season diminishes by comparison, and in a sport that had, inarguably, the greatest regular season in sports, that’s a huge blow.
Think about how badly teams like James Madison and Tulane got smoked in their respective playoff games. Now imagine teams like Virginia, Georgia Tech and Navy in the postseason as well.
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As I’ve discussed in the past, college basketball is more conducive to upsets in a single-elimination tournament format.
The advanced talent profile along the lines of scrimmage for “the big boys” alone makes it nearly impossible for a Cinderella to make a deep run in the CFP.
Meanwhile, all it takes is a hot day from beyond the arc for David to sink Goliath in the month of March.
The aggressive and expedited nature in which the playoff has expanded is concerning as well.
Just a few years ago, we had a four-team playoff (which many fans were perfectly fine with, mind you). How we got to 24 teams in less than half a decade just doesn’t sit right with me.
While the NCAA Tournament becoming a 76-team bracket sucks, it happened after a decade and a half of adding another four teams to the Big Dance.
Expansion is bad news any way you slice it for both sports, but acting like we are dealing with the same problems is ignorant.
This will fall on deaf ears, because the powers that be haven’t taken the fans into account when making big decisions in quite some time (the real, passionate fans, anyway).
Run from it. Dread it. Expansion comes for us all the same.
