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Expanding the College Football Playoff Is the Dumbest Idea We Have in Sports

We usually at least make it past the February iteration of National Signing Day before running out of college football topics to talk about, but it appears we're running out a little early this year. Jimbo Fisher went on Finebaum Tuesday and did discuss Texas A&M's 2021 recruiting class, but the conversation inevitably shifted to the expansion of the College Football Playoff.

And Fisher obviously has a bone to pick with the current format, because the Aggies ended up at No. 5 in the final CFP rankings, the first team on the outside looking in at a chance to play for a national championship. So it's no shock that the throngs of people who want to see the Playoff expanded have a new champion for their cause in A&M's head coach. But I have yet to talk to someone who wants to expand the Playoff and hear a good reason for it.

Everybody always says the exact same thing: the Playoff has become the only thing that matters in the sport and has cut down attention on previously noteworthy accomplishments and we need to give the little guys — see 2020 Cincinnati — a chance. I've explained before why teams like Cincinnati actually do have a chance they're simply refusing to take, but the other part of the argument truly does not make a shred of sense to me.

The idea that fans celebrated a Sugar Bowl victory any more in 2013 than they do now is insane. You know what fans cared about before the Playoff? The BCS National Championship. And it was still very possible to have a great season without winning the national title then as it is to have one without making the Playoff now.

But most importantly, we have now played seven College Football Playoffs and have yet to see a single one which featured four teams with a chance to win a national championship. Here is a list of the margins of victory in the 14 semifinal games: 39, 7, 38, 20, 31, 17, 18, 6, 27, 11, 35, 6, 21, 17. That's an average margin of victory of 21 points in semifinal games over the history of the Playoff.

So y'all want to take a system that clearly already features a bunch of mismatches and introduce 8-3 Florida and Cincinnati into the mix? No thank you.

I am not in favor of any system which makes crowning a champion more random. The three-game Wild Card series in the 2020 MLB Postseason was dumb and unnecessary. The NCAA Tournament, while amazing theatre, is the worst possible way one could devise to find the most deserving champion. So now we're going to punish Alabama by making it play an extra game because people have their feelings hurt that Cincinnati went undefeated against 10 versions of the School of the Blind?

And circling back to Texas A&M, the Aggies had their chance to beat the team they would have needed to beat in the Playoff and you know what happened? They lost 52-24. And I understand the Aggies were a great team — and if I was on the selection committee, I would have put the Aggies in over Ohio State — but at some point, you have to win the games necessary to be one of the four teams. If you want to be the man, you have to beat the man. And if we expand it to eight teams, we all know damn well that the coach of the team that finishes No. 9 is going to be banging his fists that we need to expand to 16. These people aren’t going to stop.

But the bottom line is that we already feature at least one team in the College Football Playoff that has no business being there. Including four more teams does nothing except punish the couple teams with a legitimate chance to win a championship and increase your odds of getting a Coastal Carolina-Florida national title game, which everybody says they want until it happens and nobody watches.

We don't need more teams in the College Football Playoff. If anything, we need fewer.