Gary Patterson Proposes 6-Team Playoff, Eliminating Conference Title Games
By Ty Duffy
TCU Horned Frogs head coach Gary Patterson plans to pitch a six-team college football playoff at the Big 12 meetings. Roughly…
* Teams 1-2 get byes for the first round. Teams 3-6 play each other the first week of December
* 5 Conference Champions with one at large.
* Conferences would get rid of conference title games. Thus, no extra games.
Getting rid of the conference title games could be a good thing. As Clay Travis spelled out at length, it would free college football to rid itself of unbalanced division alignments. With an eight-game conference schedule, an SEC team could play three permanent opponents every year and play the other teams in groups of five every other year. Alabama, for instance, could play Auburn, LSU and Tennessee every year and play every other team home and away within four years, instead of 12.
The trouble, of course, is getting rid of conference title games. The B1G has a $24 million per year deal with FOX for its title game up in 2016. That deal is undervalued. The SEC gave its title game away to CBS. Not clear what that would fetch on the open market, but it crushed every non-playoff bowl game in the ratings, with a sub-optimal Alabama vs. Missouri pairing. The extra playoff games might bring in more revenue, but not as much as having the extra playoff games and the conference title game. Any expansion of the playoff would only make those games more lucrative.
And, really, where else does a conference commissioner get to spellbound a captive audience of tens of thousands but during a protracted trophy ceremony?
Patterson’s playoff could create more problems than it solves. The current system struggles making contentious decisions with consequences. This would create more of them.
Conferences would have to break ties, which would be frequent. The Big 12 could not do that successfully with two teams playing each other with a round robin schedule. The other conferences would face an even tougher task.
This also makes the committee’s seeding more controversial. Last year, FSU getting bumped down to No.3 or No.4 was irrelevant. Under a six-team, that would be massive. Would the committee have had the fortitude to make that call again with a consequence? Good luck in any year there is not a clear No. 1 and No. 2.
Six may prove better than four. But, the question, as it has been under four, will be why not eight?