Following up on my Thoughts On the 2024 College Football Playoff, lets see how I did. We’re about 5 days out from the big day, so lets go through the list.
SEC Humbled
The SEC, for all their big talk has now gone 2 years without having a team in the championship game. And the only 9-3 SEC team to win was Ole Miss who made a statement against a depleted Duke team. Unfortunately, that statement wasn’t “We deserved to be in”. That statement was “We are entitled douchebags who are going to run up the score on a team who lost all their best players to the portal because we’re butthurt we got passed over even though we’re 9-3”. Does that mean that the SEC sucks? That they’re not the toughest conference in college football? No. It doesn’t mean any of that. It just means that for all their bluster they don’t have a monopoly on college football. Which is good. This is why there’s a college football playoff and not just the SEC championship game. As I see it, the SEC has 2 challenges in the next year. 1) Figure out how to get all these 5 stars and wins from the transfer portal to play as a team and accept being coached. And 2) figure out how to be gracious in victory and quit acting like a bunch of entitled whiny douchebags. It’s a bad look.
Bye Weeks Hurt More Than Help
None of the teams that got a bye week won. It seems that it’s more valuable to play a significantly lower ranked team and stay loose than it is to have an extra week of rest. This is likely going to influence how the bracket is laid out in the future. Throw this in with complaints about seeding and it seems clear that there should be a consensus moving forward to work on the way the seeding plays out.
Super conferences were a mistake
Having conferences that are as big as the SEC, ACC, and B1G make it exceptionally difficult to know how each conference is doing against the other until you get to the playoff. Even the inter conference play this year wasn’t particularly enlightening. We’ve created a problem that isn’t easily solved in that when you have a conference that is so large that it’s possible for one team to have a very difficult path and another to have a fairly easy path in the same conference and mess with your standings. This was a grievance listed by a lot of SEC teams who got left out. But it’s a problem the conferences created and it’s a problem the conferences will have to deal with. The proposed format where the SEC and the BIG are guaranteed 4 slots each is not the answer. It benefits 2 conferences at the expense of everybody else. And as we’ve seen this year, the SEC may be rich and swarming with talent, and the B1G may have more money than they know what to do with, but it doesn’t just rubber stamp your way to victory.
Unfortunately, there’s not a path back to the way things were when conferences made sense. So we have to make this work. And there’s no reason the other conferences should do what the SEC/BIG want and the results so far this year aren’t going to help the SEC/B1G collusion shove their way through.
The ACC
The ACC needs to get their act together. The terrible ESPN contract is a self inflicted wound that continues to deteriorate the league. But there are teams in the ACC that should be competitive. The complete laughing stock crapshow that this season was is inexcusable for a power conference. The money differential between the ACC and the SEC and B1G is a problem. But it is still possible to field competitive teams. And that has to happen for the conference to be relevant. Nevermind keeping Florida State and Clemson happy. And FSU and Clemson have legitimate grievances even if that has turned into a total clown show as well.
NIL and the Transfer Portal
It’s time for these NIL collectives to start using NIL to get some of the stuff we want out of these players. For instance, it really sucks for the fans when players sit out of bowl games. With NIL, we should be setting up the NIL deals so that if these players skip the bowl game it costs them a significant pile of that NIL money. And with it now being OK to give players money we can set up insurance policies or a fund where any player that gets hurt in a bowl game gets a payout so that these players don’t sit out to protect their draft prospect earnings. With the amount of money some of these really good players are making, they shouldn’t be skipping bowl games to protect their earning potential. They’re already earning.
Likewise, the Transfer Portal shouldn’t open until after the football season is over, meaning the championship game is played. No team should be losing players to the transfer portal during bowl season. It sucks for the fans, and it sucks for the team. But because the NCAA doesn’t profit from the bowls they have no incentive to fix this problem. Which is yet another reason the NCAA simply needs to go away.
With all that being said, as for me, I don’t care who wins at this point. I think I want to see Ohio State win, then fire Ryan Day because he lost to Michigan 4 years in a row. That would at least be funny.
