A word of warning to the FBS conference commissioners: Don’t mess with this.
We know you sat back and saw what happened across a wild Week 13 and your first thought was to change something. That’s what tends to happen in this vast ecosystem of college athletics, where needed change happens far too slowly and unwanted revisions arrive before anybody has a chance to think them through.
So as you tick off your to-do list ahead of the busy Thanksgiving holiday, just remember to practice what you tend to preach to your athletic directors, coaches and players across your leagues—take a breath, calm down and think hard about what the next move is.
We had been barrelling down to a rather chalk-ish bracket in the first year of an expanded College Football Playoff, with a host of the usual suspects meandering their way to the first round without much fuss. A potentially controversial decision, or two, down among the bottom seeds would really only upset a small slice of the sport’s most avid fans. In a sharp contrast to last season, there was no looming Florida State Seminoles situation.
Then cometh the chaos this past Saturday.
The SEC was the epicenter of earth-shattering results, where teams firmly on the right side of the bubble (the Alabama Crimson Tide and Ole Miss Rebels, in particular) suddenly found themselves on the outside looking in following inexplicable losses to unranked opponents on the road (the Oklahoma Sooners and Florida Gators, respectively). The Texas A&M Aggies needed four overtimes before they ceded further ground to the cut line after losing to the Auburn Tigers.
It was all enough to make the playoff angst in the Big Ten look quaint—and outdated by sunset—following the previously undefeated Indiana Hoosiers falling convincingly to the Ohio State Buckeyes. Nevermind that the Minnesota Gophers came within a whisker of throwing another wrench into the picture with a near-upset of the Penn State Nittany Lions in the Twin Cities.
In the Big 12, where the conference of coin flips once again underscored no result should be assumed, the BYU Cougars and Colorado Buffaloes went from controlling their postseason fates to a jumbled, four-way tie atop the standings. Matt Campbell’s Iowa State Cyclones were nearly undone by a fifth-string quarterback, but survived the Utah Utes to join them. Nothing about this league has made sense this season and showed up between the lines again Saturday.
It’s all enough chaos for some—and everybody is looking at you, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and the Big Ten’s Tony Petitti—to think adjustments need to be made.
Nonsense. Hogwash. Hell, no.
In a manner that perfectly sums up the unsettled nature of the sport, the format of the CFP is not guaranteed beyond the 2025 season. Expansion to 12 teams came too slow to save the Pac-12 from existence as we all knew it but also came so haphazardly that we had to enter a nebulous state between television contracts that would finally put crosses to Ts and dot some Is.
There has been talk of expanding further, to 14 teams. There have been ongoing discussions regarding the mix of automatic qualifiers, from as few as zero to more than half the field. Recent talking points out of some circles could cement the Big Ten and SEC with a certain number of spots, the Big 12 and ACC a handful of others, all regardless of how deserving any of those teams are.
“When it comes to the 12-team format, I think it’s created a lot of excitement this year, a lot of fan engagement, and it’s created lots of different scenarios and possibilities for different schools—which I think is incredible,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said last week. “What happens next? No one knows. I don’t have a crystal ball. I’ve said, you got to be thoughtful about it. Let’s experience the 12-team format first, and then figure it out.”
We haven’t yet reached the first Selection Sunday of the 12-team era but, so far, things seem peachy. The format is working, the games are mattering. It truly looks like we’re going to be able to settle it all on the field, legitimately, for the first time in anybody’s lifetime.
Let’s not mess with this just because a big-brand team will be headed to Florida to play a meaningless bowl game instead of one that matters on campus in late December. Don’t equate one local issue, like Kalen DeBoer’s growing pains or Lane Kiffin’s inability to figure out on-field consistency, with the bigger picture that is actually looking worthy of framing on the wall.
It needs to mean something that the Tide keeps sleepwalking through games on the road against unranked opponents. It needs to mean something that Indiana doesn’t and won’t get overlooked when they come up against a team that’s simply better than them. It needs to mean something, both positively and negatively, that you can lose to a MAC team like the Notre Dame Fighting Irish did and that be both the first thing and last thing on your resume as you settle firmly into the field.
It needs to mean something, moreover, that this entire exercise doesn’t turn into schedule roulette among the power-conference teams.
So make sure of it.
Because the reward is what we’re about to feast on as college football reaches its denouement.
The Baylor Bears, which lost in part via a Hail Mary to Colorado and had a coach many proclaimed was as good as fired by early October, has an actual path to the playoff at the moment. It can be hard to wrap your head around it (and a lot needs to happen), but it exists in this universe as a possibility.
Farmageddon between Iowa State and the Kansas State Wildcats has its usual Midwestern bragging rights and then some. The Arizona Wildcats are in the middle of a dreadful comedown from last season but can still cherish the role of spoiler Saturday. The Vanderbilt Commodores, playing with house money from the moment they beat Alabama earlier in the year, are capable of throwing a wrench into the field with a win over the Tennessee Volunteers, too.
And, of course, there’s the return of the Texas Longhorns heading down to Kyle Field to take on Texas A&M, which is already dripping with 13 years of bitterness and now will have the table stakes of an SEC championship berth on the line, too. The latter has to win out to make the tournament, the former have no assurances and better make it to Atlanta to leave no doubt in their inaugural journey of it just meaning more.
It’s all so glorious … unless you have a rooting interest.
The games are more interesting at this point in the season and more fan bases are in line to have late-November games with something actually on the line, even beyond winning a conference. There’s still a theoretical glimmer of hope for a good quarter of FBS teams, from the still-flawed Alabama to the South Carolina Gamecocks to the Tulane Green Wave and far beyond.
Things are working as they should. The system is good. Late-season chaos and the resulting effect it has on the CFP is a feature of the sport, not a bug.
Hopefully the assorted commissioners, when they gather in their swanky hotels to hash out the postseason’s future over the coming months, will remember that.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Chaos of Week 13 Shows Expanded College Football Playoff Is Working.
