BYE Week Missive: The 24-Team Playoff
When news broke that College Football would plunge headlong into a 24 Team playoff, I tabbed the Notre Dame bye week to write about it. Turns out that I couldn't have picked a better time slot considering the chaos that has unfolded in the past couple of weeks since that announcement.
I wanted to approach this from a different angle. The goal was not to be contrarian for clicks, but rather something in my current life that I can relate all too well with.
Most of you know that my day job involves me managing a team of sales engineers and, recently, leaders of sales engineers. I don't call the shots for the entire organization, meaning that folks levels above me will put in changes that I absolutely do not agree with, yet need to implement and not have a full mutiny on my hands.
I'm sure you've seen this in your professional life too. Someone on high makes sweeping, completely unpopular changes created in such a way that you're convinced the people in charge absolutely do not understand the day-to-day realities of what you & your team are doing.
That's where we are.
Football, by it's nature is built on small sample sizes. It's what makes statistical analysis of the sport both so fascinating and so divisive. Now expand that limited sample size if you're ESPN/Disney, seeing the massive amounts of money that you're spending to monopolize the sport's brand-new postseason. You've seen the comments about how boring the first can be too boring and deserving teams are left out in favor of auto-bids.
So they pulled the easiest lever they can: put more teams in. Now you have almost the entire top 25 in. The top 8 have byes, meaning 9-24 all play each other. Within those 8 games, there will be a much, much higher chance of competitive games instead of an entire round of blowouts. Problem solved!
Sure the second round may now house the beatings, but perhaps the bye week playoff curse continues and things get spicy. That's not the goal though. The goal is to get more eyeballs over the next six years before it gets blown up all over again (let's be honest, it might be less than that).
And here's the really fun part: that's all we know for sure. Auto bids, conference championships, power conference designations...all of that is still up in the air.
This is when we, as the college football middle-mangers have our chance to steer the ship away from the iceberg, pushing our influence as hard as we can before the golden goose goes to slaughter for short-term gains.
Get caffeinated and hop into the conference room with me.
Kill the Conference Championship Games
Let's start with what should be the least controversial move. Everyone is supposed to get a bigger pile of money that should replace the conference championship pile of money.
