Ryan Day doesn’t expect a 24-team playoff to benefit his program. Nonetheless, he’s following the conference line that more access to more teams is good for the sport. (Press Pros Feature Photos)
The Big Ten Commish says follow me to a promise that more is better. But all we’ll get is an accentuation of mediocrity, meaningless games and a tournament fans don’t want.
Among those learned (but vacant) minds threatening to dismantle the best of college football, there is nothing as uncommon as common sense.
This faction tells itself its grandiose idea to expand the playoffs to 24 teams is righteous, altruistic and levels the playing field. Noble, they say, is their cause.
However, they are deceived by the groupthink of their little club. What they don’t get is that they are running against eight in the box because they are too blind to see their doom. Not a doom of disappearing from existence, but a doom of decreasing their uniqueness and appeal.
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The classic signs of groupthink exist thanks to the Big Ten’s Pied Piper, Commish Tony Petitti. They view their sport as invulnerable. Self-censorship exists because when did 18 football coaches ever reach a consensus honestly. This creates a false assumption that the Piper is leading them to reason.
Veteran columnist Jeff Gilbert writes the OHSAA and Ohio State sports for Press Pros Magazine.com. Follow on X @jw_gilbert
This push for 24 teams – whether it happens for the next playoff or somewhere down the Pied Piper’s path – would be a dereliction of duty to common sense. Being against 24 isn’t being afraid of change. It’s about being against mediocrity, an all-too-often acceptable position in modern society, particularly in academia.
Where is the common sense? That, along with horse sense, has left the barn.
Thus, college football – the industry of those sitting in board rooms, not the product on the field – is becoming a caricature of itself.
A caricature, like the sketch for which you sit at amusement parks and pay too much for, is meant to exaggerate unique features and traits while still looking like you. Those are fun and no one, especially the subject, takes them seriously.
But doing this caricature thing to yourself? Not good. That kind of thinking oversimplifies important factors, focuses on personal brand at a high-risk level, ignores deep consequences and belittles nuance.
Tony Petitti’s aim is to turn college football into a year-end tournament.
Commish Petitti, a former TV producer and Major League Baseball executive, ignores everything from tradition to common sense that makes the sport great because he wants a tournament like every other sport. It’ll be fun.
Dear Commish, what’s wrong with unique? Champion the uniqueness. Market it. Be better than the other sports. Quit trying to be the NFL.
Deaf ears.
Petitti seems to have convinced all his coaches and athletic directors to follow him toward a 24-team playoff that he says will bring order to the universe, make everybody who gives a rip about the sport happy and make them all a lot more money.
It’s all so emotional, so empty, so greedy.
Thankfully, the conference Big Ten fans love to hate, the mighty but fallen SEC, displays common sense on this matter, at least for now. Those two leagues are the only votes that count. And through some unknown conversations – possibly aggressive ones – the ACC and Big 12 have come around to the 24-team idea.
The SEC, however, stands firm, though not unanimous, against any conversation that would increase the 2027 playoff beyond 16 teams.
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The 12-team playoff is practically perfect – enough games to make it compelling but not too many to turn college football into a full-blown tournament sport full of irrelevant games. The past two seasons have been enjoyable without ruining the fabric of the game many said it would. No truthful Ohio State fan will say otherwise after basking in the championship run two seasons ago. Twelve is great. Sixteen won’t make me crazy, but it’s more than necessary.
SEC coaches Kirby Smart of Georgia and Mike Elko of Texas A&M correctly said college football is not a tournament sport. Yes, 12 teams is a tournament setup, but you know what they mean.
I see no pros to 24 teams, only cons. But let’s break this argument down into the Petitti pros and the common-sense cons.
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Petitti and some Big Ten coaches tout the idea of more access to the tournament. The corresponding con is lowering the standard of excellence. With 24 teams, the first-round games will be no more interesting than bowl games played between middling teams in half-empty to empty stadiums on weeknights during whatever ESPN calls its bowl week these days.
Only the diehard football lovers, with nothing better to do, watch those games. Not judging those who do. Just saying that there is no broad appetite for those games because none of those teams are even getting to the semifinals.
Some coaches, particularly Minnesota’s P.J. Fleck, want their mediocrity rewarded.
“I don’t think we like the 24-team playoff; we absolutely love the 24-team playoff, especially at the University of Minnesota,” Fleck told reporters at Big Ten meeting last week. “It allows us to have a way better chance to be able to play in the College Football Playoff every single year, based on the resources that we have and the challenges that we have.”
Translation: Minnesota and the like won’t need to get better or strive to be the next Indiana. Just being any old Top 25 team will be enough. With a 24-team playoff, I suppose we’ll need a Top 40 AP poll and playoff rankings every week to be sure we have every potential playoff participant on our bubble-watch radar.
Ain’t nobody got time for that.
But, apparently, they’ve got time to go 9-3, lose to the only three good teams on their schedule and get invited to the playoff party. That would have been Michigan this year at 9-3 with losses to Oklahoma, USC and Ohio State. Then they lost to Texas in the Citrus Bowl. That’s not a playoff team.
How would a team like Michigan – you watched them play – enhance the playoff product? It wouldn’t. It would only reward mediocrity and make them a Minnesota. Yes, getting in any way possible would be a huge deal for Minnesota. But do programs like Michigan want in only to lose?
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Do we really want football to be like basketball?
North Carolina made the basketball tournament as a No. 6 seed and lost to VCU in overtime in the first round. The Tar Heels fired head coach Hubert Davis.
Ohio State made it after missing the tournament for three years. That was good news until the Buckeyes lost in the first round, but expectations for OSU basketball aren’t the same as they are in Chapel Hill. So Jake Diebler kept his job.
The Miami RedHawks made it and won a game in the First Four. Oxford is still smiling. And head coach Travis Steele just got a contract extension through 2034.
Fleck sees an extension on the horizon if he gets in the playoff, but he better be careful what he wishes for. Make it a couple times, maybe win a game or two, and expectations you can guarantee will rise.
The Petitti faction prefers more games, more TV money and a termination of conference championship games lest the tournament drags into February. This is ultimately about money. But not just making a good free-enterprise driven profit. This is about making up groupthink reasons to mask greed. The Big Ten finally won some national championships and can’t get over itself.
So, they say, let’s expand and have more. More of what?
Eight playoff games on TruTV and Peacock that amount to play-in games to get to the Sweet 16? Have you seen the list of what those games would have been like this past season? Not much intrigue beyond the individual fan bases. And James Madison wouldn’t have made it. Oh, the horror.
Fortunately, that entity all sports fans complain about but never boycott – TV – holds the keys. By all reports they have neither the appetite nor the dollars top pay the Piper. That stops this expansion right now. But, sadly, probably not forever.
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Expansion, whenever it comes, will render most of September meaningless. Get used to more MAC teams getting a payout to come to the Horseshoe. Those tickets shouldn’t cost a dime over $20. Goodbye to those games like Texas and the ones against Alabama coming in 2027 and 2028. That’s Petitti progress.
Speaking of progress, Petitti is riding the wave of conference bragging rights over the SEC.
Big deal.
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Fans care about their teams more than their leagues, or at least they should. Conference chest-pounding mattered some when the tournament was two teams and four teams. Proof of excellence by association carried weight. But with 24 teams? Just win nine games in the Big Ten and you’re in. Win eight with a couple wins over top-24 teams and that’s probably enough.
More on why the have-nots view 24 as a pro: They buy Petitti’s sales pitch thinking he’s going to bat for them and cares as much about them as he does about Ohio State and a few others. The Minnesotas are just political footballs to get what he wants for the flagships.
Some say the biggest con of all is a cheapening of The Game. That somehow the highest rated regular season game will lose its panache.
Depends on how you look at it.
Ryan Day said 24 teams doesn’t help his team, but he’s for it if it helps the league. That’s lukewarm. But he did say the proposed elimination of the Big Ten title game would make his team’s annual tussle with Michigan more meaningful. It will be for playoff seeding, he reasons. Yes, you want the best seed possible, but does that really make The Game more intense?
Joe Rexrode wrote in The Athletic that the rivalry is reason enough to bag the 24-team idea. He says its importance will be diminished. He’s half right.
Nothing will degrade this game inside either program or fan base. The rivalry, the hatred, the bragging rights run too deep. National relevance would take a hit some years but not in years when both are seen as national title contenders. Fox and its advertisers will have the most to lose if the entire nation isn’t compelled to watch.
But the biggest con is Petitti’s feel-good proposition.
Enterprises don’t necessarily prosper because of more. Unnecessary ventures into rewarding mediocrity only weaken the sport’s stability, its allure and the passion it produces.
The path, however, I fear is set. And the Piper’s calling them to join him.
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