The CFP is a twelve-team tournament at least for now although I am confident it will be expanded to at least 16 teams and maybe even 24 teams down the road. I don’t think that is such a great idea but let me take a deep breath and resign myself to the coming expansion and make a few comments upon that.
Coaches seem to have been in favor of the expansion with the idea that making the expanded field of 24 teams would make coaches in top-shelf programs more secure as they slide into the playoffs more years than not. There is surely validity to that thinking but the obverse may also be true; if a school with overly ambitious goals for its football team misses those expanded playoffs two years in a row, that could raise the temperature of the coach’s seat significantly. I am not sure how that sword would cut …
Expanding the playoff field to 24 teams could lead to a playoff field that looks like this:
- Top 6 teams from the SEC
- Top 6 Teams from Big-10
- Top 4 teams from ACC
- Top 4 teams from Big-12
- At least 1 conference winner from the G6
- A couple of at-large entries
On one hand, is there really going to be a large entertainment value in a game between the sixth place SEC team and the second place Big-12 team? I don’t think so, but that answer must be put in the context of the college football post-season that exists now. There are about 40 bowl games and many of the matchups are threadbare at best. So, would my hypothetical matchup from an expanded CFP be any less entertaining?
As of this morning, the second-place team in the Big-12 is Texas Tech and the sixth-place team in the SEC is Ole Miss. That matchup would not be “must see TV” here in Curmudgeon Central but it would be a lot better than Wyoming versus Middle Tennessee State in the “Who Gives A Rat’s Ass Bowl”.
Many – maybe even most – of the mid-December bowl games are god-awful spectacles and replacing them with expanded CFP games would increase their watchability significantly even if the two teams in that expanded CFP game are unlikely to make the “Final Four” of the CFP. It would certainly be a bigger live audience for the bowl organizers to deal with if the game had some modicum of “importance” as opposed to a meaningless game between two schools that may not have known the opponent actually played college football until the bowl invitation arrived.
Lots of the minor bowl games are in “cold weather locales” and the live attendance for many of those games would easily fit in your typical college basketball venue. So, there are benefits to having more CFP games to deal with even if the first – – and maybe even the second – – round games are not “CFP relevant”. Not to worry, I still prefer the current 12 team format to any expansion; my point here is that maybe expansion is not all bad.
Moving on … I mentioned last week that I noticed that NC State had fired Dave Doreen as its head football coach. The stories now seem to indicate that the school is hiring Philip Rivers to take over that football program. No doubt about it; that is a noteworthy hiring; Rivers is an alum of the school, and he had a very successful NFL career after leaving NC State. That hiring seems to me to be like most of Danny Boy Snyder’s hiring decisions for his coaches – – lots of glitz and press conference appeal but questionable foundation pieces under the choice.
Philip Rivers was a really good QB in the NFL but being a head coach and being a QB do not necessarily demand the same skill set. Rivers has no coaching experience at the collegiate level let alone head-coaching experience. Since retiring from the NFL, he has been coaching a private school football team in Alabama for a couple of years. The NC State job is a huge step up from that experience.
I can think of one other NFL QB who jumped into college coaching at the head-coach level; Trent Dilfer took over the UAB program after his retirement. In Dilfer’s three-year stint with the Blazers his record was 9-21 which is hardly what one would call “successful”.
Also, recall when the Indy Colts handed the head coaching job to Jeff Saturday. Let’s just agree that did not work out well at all.
So, good luck to Rivers who seems to be a really nice person, but I think he has a steep learning curve to execute if he actually gets that job.
Finally, ponder this from Laurence J. Peter – – the one who identified the Peter Principle:
“If two wrongs don’t make a right, try three.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………