Should College Football Expand to 8-Team Playoff?
The four-team College Football Playoff has rendered the Rose Bowl as the consolation prize for fifth-ranked, Big Ten champion Penn State.
The committee has left out Big 12 champion Oklahoma, despite nine straight wins and an unblemished conference record, and rendered it as a playoff afterthought due to two out-of-conference losses.
The playoff has left Western Michigan, which won the MAC and is the only team not named Alabama to finish with a perfect record, as a non-factor in the race for the meaningful college football postseason.
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Despite all of that, the sport should not even consider expanding to an eight-team playoff because playoff expansion would shift the focus of the meaningful postseason from rewarding excellence to granting access.
It should never be access over excellence.
An eight-team playoff will never be the best eight teams. You wouldn't get No. 1 Alabama against No. 8 Wisconsin or No. 2 Clemson vs. No. 7 Oklahoma in national quarterfinals.
That story rests in the fiction section of the hypothetical playoff library.
The only way conference commissioners sign off on future expansion is if they do their jobs, ensure a place for at least one of their teams in the bracket and guarantee automatic bids for conference champions.
That doesn't just mean for the Power Five conferences; it would be for the highest-ranked Group of Five champion as well. The commissioners have themselves to look out for, and if they don't guarantee at least one of their teams a spot, they would—and should—be fired.
For this year, that would mean the playoff bracket would look like this:
| No. 1 Alabama (13-0) | No. 15 Western Michigan (13-0) |
| No. 2 Clemson (12-1) | No. 7 Oklahoma (10-2) |
| No. 3 Ohio State (11-1) | No. 6 Michigan (10-2) |
| No. 4 Washington (12-1) | No. 5 Penn State (11-2) |
It's relatively clean this year, although the absence of USC—perhaps the hottest team in the sport—would certainly draw some criticism.
That wouldn't be the case every year. In fact, most years would be much, much worse.
In 2012, five-loss Wisconsin won the Big Ten Championship Game due in part to Ohio State and Penn State being ineligible. Did that Badgers team deserve as much of a chance to win the national title as, at the time, undefeated Notre Dame and one-loss Alabama?
Of course not.
| No. 1 Notre Dame (12-0) | Unranked Wisconsin (8-5) |
| No. 2 Alabama (12-1) | No. 15 Northern Illinois (12-1) |
| No. 3 Florida (11-1) | No. 12 Florida State (11-2) |
| No. 5 Kansas State (11-1) | No. 6 Stanford (11-2) |
Not only would fourth-ranked Oregon be out based on its head-to-head loss to Stanford, but you'd have three teams outside of the top 10 in the eight-team playoff, including one that's not even ranked.
This year's hypothetical eight-team tournament might seem "good enough," but that won't always be the case. It's far more important to protect the integrity of the national title by preventing unworthy teams from getting hot in the postseason and winning something they didn't deserve during the first three months of the season.
If that means a good team is on the outside looking in every once in a while, that's fine.
What if Florida had topped Alabama in the 2016 SEC Championship Game?
There's no way a three-loss Florida team would deserve the same access to a title as one-loss Clemson.
Therein lies the problem.
It's much better for the game, the integrity of the best regular season in sports and the prestige of the national title if the definition of "excellence" ebbs and flows with how the landscape is defined throughout the year.
In some years, that means spreading the love throughout the country to various conference champions who avoided the pitfalls of the season and asserted themselves as the best in the country. In others, like 2011 when Alabama won the national title without winning its own division, it means taking a step back and understanding that championships—both conference and division—that are largely determined arbitrarily by geography have literally nothing to do with football prowess.
Don't expand the playoff to eight. That'd only cause more problems.
In fact, if we used the current playoff selection process and reduced the meaningful postseason to two, you'd get Alabama vs. Clemson—which is really all you need anyway.
Quotes obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted. Statistics courtesy of cfbstats unless otherwise noted.
Barrett Sallee is the lead SEC college football writer and national college football video analyst for Bleacher Report, as well as a host on Bleacher Report Radio on SiriusXM 83. Follow Barrett on Twitter @BarrettSallee.
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