College Football Debates a 12-Team Playoff. Here’s What Works—and Doesn’t. – The Wall Street Journal

Sounds good? Sounds better, at least. College football fans have been agitating for playoff expansion for a while—its final four may have crowned worthy champions, but it invariably left some excellent, even undefeated teams pressing sad noses against the window. The shift (which again, is a proposal, and needs to be approved) is an upbeat jolt for “Group of 5” conferences which have yearned to compete against the megawatt “Power 5” juggernauts, and it hopefully emboldens schools worried they’re getting lapped by the top-tier elites.

There’s no assurance the playing field will level, however. An expanded tournament might simply mean that more schools will now have a shot…to lose to Alabama.

More than anything, this expanded playoff is a lucrative television product that will command an appropriately high price—and that’s really what drives this, college football’s never-ending urge to pad its bottom line. It is also spectacular news for the chips & snacks aisle of our local supermarkets, as we will all now spend several more weeks locked to the couch, snacking away, glued to another sports showdown. 

Everyone wins—except waistlines.   

Sure: There’s some comedy in college football, which for years denied any interest in playoff expansion, suddenly leaning into it, but honestly, “doing something we promised we weren’t going to do” is, by now, a not-so-secret college football trade secret. This is, after all, a perplexing industry in which 14 football teams play in the Big 10, and 10 football teams play in the Big 12. If you need everything to make sense all of the time, watch tennis. 

Naturally, some beautiful college football nonsense embedded in the 12-team proposal, in that it’s still trying to tether its playoff to its old-world allegiances to bowl games. 

After a first round with qualifying teams Nos. 5 through 12 playing in the higher-seeded team’s home stadium, the playoff will shift, for the following three rounds, to a rotation of bowls at neutral sites. That’s right: under the current proposal, the top 4 teams, having sat out the first round with a bye, will not get to host home games, but instead will be asked to go on the road to rotating Bowls to be Named Later. 

Wait, what? 

This cake-and-eat-it-too maneuver blows a golden opportunity. There’s nothing in college football like a big-time home game, and this proposal runs away from it, to the point of penalizing the teams that deserve home games the most. What college football fan prefers a game played in a neutral steel dome to one played in the throbbing heart of campus? Home games—rowdy student sections, sumptuous tailgates, the endless noise—are college football’s most magical attribute, and yet the sport continues to insist on a stubborn loyalty to zombie bowls already rendered meaningless by the playoff pivot.

Home games, home games, home games—that’s my advice. I know there’s some worry of: Well, who wants to see January college playoff games in the frigid upper Midwest? To which I think: Bring it on! Seriously: embrace the elements. Stop treating college football’s postseason as a seafood tower corporate junket. Atmosphere is everything! Suturing a 12-team playoff to blah bowls is like someone offering to pay for a big huge wedding…as long as you get married in a windowless room, at the airport, on a Wednesday morning, in front of strangers. 

There are other concerns. Chief among them is schedule inflation—with a playoff team potentially playing four extra games, perhaps five after playing in a conference championship, you’re talking about a significant increase in labor (and risk) to unpaid athletes. Name, Image and Likeness reform is on the college sports docket—but NIL will not be enough to cover this. Maybe the regular season schedules will be abbreviated, but these are maneuvers guided by money, and if recent player empowerment efforts on campus are any indication, who shares it will become an issue.

Also on the regular season: There’s worry that an expanded playoff will take the buzz out it, as early rivalry games that felt hugely important in September and October won’t pack as much of a punch, because a loss—or two losses, or even three—is less likely to bounce a team from playoff consideration. Will those early months lose allure? College basketball’s regular season now feels like an unnecessary appetizer, for hardcore fans only.   

There’s also this:

Sometimes I wonder if college football’s movers and shakers—and the media—spend too much time obsessing about finding the ultimate champion and making the postseason system fairer (as if fairness is attainable) and not enough time acknowledging that debate, not resolution, is really the thing. 

Think about it: Much of what makes college football such an amusingly intense sport is that it was, for a long time, really just a series of unresolved arguments—my conference is the best, your conference is the worst, my team is this, your team is Michigan, and so on. That unknowingness has already been diminished by the playoff—to say nothing of the zombie bowls—and I wonder if there’s a bit of “be careful what you wish for” with the expansion, that one day we will look upon a neatly-settled tournament with 12 teams, or however many teams, and grow nostalgic for times when we could just argue about it all day long, because endless arguing was another college football trade secret.

That’s not how it works anymore, though. Twelve feels like it’s coming, so it’s onward to 12.

Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com