The SEC and the Big Ten just don’t know when to quit. They are destined to take over college football one way or the other. The latest attempt to truly monopolize college football is to have more control over automatic bids.
According to Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger, the two power conferences are proposing a 14 or even 16 team playoff and with it more automatic bids. It’s getting ridiculous. And the fact that the other FBS conferences agreed to let the Big Ten and SEC to police how the College Football Playoff expands is erratic.
Dellenger added in a Yahoo Sports story that in order to keep the Big Ten and SEC from creating their own format, they granted them control of how the playoff is formatted as well as majority of the revenue.
At this point, it feels more of a long shot than a reality that the integrity of the College Football Playoff can remain intact. The SEC and Big Ten are power hungry and after what looks to be a brief snapshot of what a 12-team playoff looks like, they’re ready to exercise their ultimate control to get what they want.
SEC-Big Ten superpower: Is it too late to save the College Football Playoff?
I get it, the SEC and Big Ten regularly have the toughest conference games amongst any of the FBS conferences year after year. But to think they’re punished because of that, it is ignorant. At the end of the day, the playoff should be rewarded not just given to teams because of their conference affiliation.
With a new proposed format, for example, each team would get four automatic bids. Let’s look at this past season. The Big Ten had four teams make the playoff. Why do they need to create “automatic” bids when they can already get four teams in.
And then in terms of the SEC, they got three teams in. Did the conference really need four teams to make it this year? If they did, they should have won the games they needed to. Because the ACC had two teams make it that could have easily been replaced with Alabama or Ole Miss had either not had bad, late season losses.
For what it’s worth, the SEC champion didn’t even win a College Football Playoff game and the Big Ten essentially beat themselves to ultimately win the title. Most reasonable, college football fans don’t want to watch the same eight teams play in the playoffs every year.
Because with eight automatic bids between the two super conferences, that’s essentially what it would be. Ohio State and Penn State would basically be in it every year. As long as Michigan has a half decent season, they’ll probably be in it as well and Oregon isn’t showing signs of regressing.
In the SEC, if Texas can continue to recruit the SEC like it has, they’ll be a mainstay along with CFP veterans Alabama and Georgia. The fourth one is up for grabs, but at the end of the day, won’t have any real parity.
The CFP expansion was supposed to give a true playoff format. It wasn’t supposed to reward teams for mediocre seasons. That’s what the SEC and Big Ten’s proposal is. It’s participation awards for teams in bigger conferences.
How about this, just like in college basketball, how about you win the games you’re supposed to and let the committee decide if what you did each season deserves a spot in the CFP. Otherwise you’re watering down why the CFP was even invented to begin with.