Mike Leach Makes Proposal for 64-Team College Football Playoff, Again

Washington State head coach Mike Leach is known for going against the grain. 

For example, Leach's Air Raid attack with the Cougars averaged a gaudy 64 pass attempts per game last season, which was the first in the College Football Playoff era.

And that's the exact number of teams Leach wants to see in future editions of the playoff—64. 

According to Heather Dinich of ESPN.com, Leach said Wednesday in a playoff-specific interview with the network that he wants to see the four-team field expand exponentially.

"I don’t know why you don’t have 64 teams," Leach said. "The notion of pinpointing and selecting four perfectly, well that’s not going to happen. That can’t happen effectively."

This isn't the first time Leach has proposed the mega-playoff. He first made headlines with his idea back in 2012, when the plus-one system was picking up steam.

Leach's idea for a 64-team playoff, per Dinich, starts with all FBS teams playing a 10-game schedule. By the end of the playoff, the last team standing would have only played 16 games, which is just one more than 2014 champion Ohio State played last season.

Eric Gay/Associated Press

The Washington State head coach told ESPN that narrowing the field of teams down to just four by the end of the season creates too much controversy.

"It would be indisputable that it was settled on the field and somebody that wins playoff games accordingly deserves to be champion and there’s no debate," Leach said. "It would be great fun to watch—just like it is at all the other levels."

Unfortunately for Leach, no other level of NCAA football has a playoff quite as large as the one Leach proposes.

FCS and Division II football currently have 24-team playoffs, with the top eight teams earning byes to the second round. Division III football has a standard 32-team playoff.

The 64-team concept has been a fun "what if?" scenario to talk about in the last few offseasons. Bleacher Report's Adam Kramer made the latest of his annual March Madness-style brackets in April.

Don't expect Leach's idea to get much traction, even with all the talk of playoff expansion just one year after the first four-team edition. The CFP is currently contracted to be the four-team format for the next 11 seasons. 

But like many things Leach has said in his coaching career, it's definitely going to grab attention—again.

Justin Ferguson is an on-call college football writer at Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @JFergusonBR.