Craig Thompson, the commissioner of the Mountain West Conference and a member of the College Football Playoff management committee, hopes that with the event’s expansion, more games will be played on campus rather than tied in with the existing bowl structure within the sport.
Speaking to Sports Illustrated on the heels of a wild Week 7, Thompson argued that the biggest games should be on campus, rather than at neutral sites as is the case with the current four-team Playoff system and bowl games.
“Maybe we need to have more Playoff games on campus,” Thompson says, after a weekend that saw Tennessee beat Alabama, TCU beat Oklahoma State and Utah beat USC in exciting ranked battles as home teams.
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The current expansion model, which was adopted on Sept. 2, calls for the first round to be played at on-campus venues hosted by the higher seeds. Of course, in that system, the best teams in the sport—the top-four seeds who have byes through to the quarterfinals—would lose out on that opportunity.
Thompson believes the sport is losing one of its greatest aspects by sticking with the neutral site games.
“This is one man’s opinion,” Thompson says. “[College football] is a campus deal, right? It’s exciting. The excitement of college football is the pageantry.”
The MWC commissioner, who will retire at year’s end, admits that the change won’t come with the upcoming expansion, and has not been discussed in an official capacity among commissioners, but is a “possibility down the road.”
As of now, College Football Playoff expansion to 12 teams is on the table for 2024 or ’25. While the move is broadly popular, the NFL’s constant schedule expansion—with the recent move to a 17-game regular season, its own playoff expansion and encroachment on even more traditional college football dates like Black Friday—presents a major issue for the sport’s decisionmakers.
“You’re just trying to minimize all the ways the NFL will f--- you,” one CFP official told SI this week.
“The NFL is squashing us,” a league commissioner added. “And now Black Friday? Where does it end?”
