The College Football Playoff is suffering from blowout fatigue. Fixing it won't be easy.
Alabama takes care of business against Cincinnati, advances to national championship game
You could make the argument this is exactly what the playoff was designed to do. As much as fans and administrators in other conferences might roll their eyes at an all-SEC matchup, further regionalizing a sport that has become heavily tilted toward the Southeast over the last decade, this year’s playoff unquestionably identified the two best teams. If you can strip away all regional bias, it’s the only matchup that would give us the possibility of a memorable championship game on Jan.
This conversation is happening at a time when the sport’s leaders are still haggling over the details of playoff expansion, which will end up likely being 12 teams. There’s no real debate anymore about expansion. It’s going to happen. What isn’t discussed is the possibility that a bigger playoff will suck some of the drama from the regular season while failing to actually solve the problem we saw Friday night.
But for most of its history, college football has been a sport ruled by a small group of elite programs that rise and fall every few years. What we don’t have anymore are the outliers from the poll era like BYU in 1984 clinching a national title by beating 6-6 Michigan in the Holiday Bowl or 1990 when the top-ranked teams were all obligated to different bowl games, leaving Georgia Tech and Colorado to share the championship.
In a sense, college football is what any sport would look like if there were no regulations designed to make it more competitive like the salary cap or draft. Its ethos is far more similar to European soccer, where the richest and most popular teams win pretty much all the time, than the NFL.