Rarely do you see a sports story that gets Mike Greenberg riled up enough for a snarky rant, but few discussions have enraged sports media quite like the potential looming expansion of the College Football Playoff to 24 teams.
Discussing the clear momentum toward a 24-team postseason for college football on Thursday on Get Up, Greenberg expressed his fear that loading so many teams into the CFP not only devalues the regular season, as others have argued, but moves college football toward something closer to a sideshow than a serious sport.
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“What I can tell you with certainty is that good teams, championship-worthy teams getting left out of the Playoff is a good thing, not a bad thing,” Greenberg said.
“If you put every single team that might win the championship into the Playoff … you might just as well not play the regular season to begin with. If we live in a world … whether Ohio State and Michigan rest their starters for that game at the end of the season because they’ve got the potential of five playoff games still sitting in front of them, then college football as we know it ceases to exist.”
In recent weeks, a top coaches’ association, as well as the Big Ten, Big 12, and ACC, have all endorsed the 24-team plan. The SEC remains the lone holdout, and unless commissioner Greg Sankey splits with the entire rest of the sport to nix the expansion, the CFP will double in size.
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The 24-team Playoff does not appear to have many supporters among fans across the country or in the media, where several prominent voices have pointed out that the plan seems like a cash grab that will wreck the sport’s once-enviable regular season.
Greenberg echoed these concerns on Thursday on Get Up.
“I don’t have a vote in any of this,” he said. “Obviously other people do, and they’ll make the decisions that they have to make for reasons that, candidly, have nothing to do with what’s in the best interest of the game itself.”
To Greenberg’s main point, while postseason expansion has come for every sport (including college basketball, which just added eight more teams to its tournament this month), college football works differently. The disparity between the best programs and the worst is massive, such that only a handful of teams enter the season with a chance to win the championship. And college football decides its standings through a committee of voters, meaning that perception and reputation matter nearly as much as outcomes.
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So while a potential 24-team field might do away with automatic bids for top conferences, voters are bound to still value a three-loss SEC school more highly than most top Group of Five programs. And with that cushion beneath them, programs would enter the season knowing they could stomach multiple losses and still turn it on come winter to push for a title.
Greenberg may sound alarmist, describing the growth of the sport as its demise, but it is hard to maintain a competitive spirit in a sport that works this way.
The post Mike Greenberg: CFP expansion could lead to end of college football ‘as we know it’ appeared first on Awful Announcing.
