STOP THE MISMATCHES: THE COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFF SHOULD BE THE BEST 12 TEAMS

I’m going to make this entry short, sweet, and to the point. Why? Because it’s my blog, and I can pretty much do whatever the hell I feel like.

I’m grateful college football has finally gone to a real playoff and not that four-team bullshit. They almost got it right, except for one thing: these auto-qualifiers.

Maybe it’s time for the power conferences to break off in football and give us the 12 best teams with no auto-qualifiers. If that’s the case, Division I can split into a third level somewhere between the current FBS and FCS (formerly 1-AA).

Yesterday, many Americans had to sit through late-afternoon and evening beatdowns involving Tulane and James Madison. I have nothing but respect for both those programs and the seasons they had. In a way, I guess they earned it, but that doesn’t mean they belonged there, if that makes sense.

And I know everyone loves the March Madness basketball tournament and the Cinderella stories it gives us, but football is different. It’s more physical, and it takes more than two guys getting hot on the floor to carry a team to a monumental upset. In college football, if you’re outmatched in the trenches and you don’t have depth, you’re not “hanging around”; you’re literally getting beat down worse than a child predator in the prison yard.

The committee appeared to get it right with Alabama and Miami making the playoff over Notre Dame, but that’s not to say Notre Dame and BYU should’ve been left out. I think I speak for many when I say Ole Miss vs. Notre Dame and Oregon vs. BYU would’ve been a lot more entertaining than the trash we got yesterday.

I understand steps have been taken to prevent two non-power conference teams from getting into the playoff in the same season again. Unfortunately, it took it actually happening for those measures to be put in place.

If those two games showed us anything, it’s that a 24-team playoff would be a mistake. If expansion is on the horizon, max it out at 16. Don’t give us two rounds of mismatches.

But for now? Just give us the best 12 teams. Let’s not act like this is the only thing college football needs to fix, though.

Right now, the sport is the Wild West.

NIL isn’t going anywhere, but what about NIL plus the transfer portal?

It’s time for five years of eligibility, so we can do away with this redshirt nonsense. Give players one penalty-free transfer because kids make the wrong decision sometimes, or life happens. After that? You transfer again, you sit out a year, and you lose that year of eligibility. We can’t have guys hopping in the portal every offseason like it’s free agency.

College football is still one of America’s greatest treasures.

It’s just time to put up some boundaries and give the sport guardrails again, because the current setup with NIL and the portal isn’t sustainable.

I’d love to stay and write more on this, but it’s time to get some beers in my system so I can sit through another Browns loss today.