Let me start off with a challenge to you: name one major sport that doesn’t have a playoff, besides College Football. I’ll give you a minute… No, I’ll give you a year because you won’t find one.

The only major sport that doesn’t have a playoff is College Football. They haven’t had one in 145 years of existence, until now you could say. But I say a four team “playoff” is a complete joke and an embarrassment to the sport. Four isn’t a playoff, just a semifinal game where a, hopefully objective, committee has the unenviable task of picking four teams out of 125 FBS teams.

Picking the four best teams in the country is almost impossible without having a larger playoff where the results can speak for themselves. Trying to pick the teams, without a playoff, is a recipe for controversy and frustration, especially when you consider that one conference champion, or possible two or three, are going to be left out of the playoff. Winning your conference is no longer enough and I don’t believe that it should be.

I think the best thing we can hope happens is that there is such incredible controversy and anger over who gets in and who doesn’t that the playoff is forced to expand. I think the optimum number for a playoff is 16, but I wouldn’t complain with 8. Picking between the #4 team and #5 team is infinitely harder than picking between #8 and #9 or #16 and #17.

Unfortunately, the playoff doesn’t look to be expanding any time soon since the contract with ESPN and the Bowl games extends for 12 years.

Want to know why that’s so? So do I!

I think it’s money. There is so much money in college football that any major change is going to face an onslaught of corporations, conferences, and owners who like receiving a fat paycheck. FCS teams have a playoff that has been a huge success but they don’t attract a fraction of the money FBS does.

Until the playoff expands, controversy will run red throughout the landscape of college football. The conferences left out will be furious, and they should be. A playoff of only four teams is inherently unfair since it forces a subjective analysis of teams instead of an objective analysis where the games are actually played instead of predicted.

Very few college football predictions have come true as the season has progressed, so why should we trust predictions to pick the top four teams when we can’t make consistently accurate predictions about football, or the weather? Only games should decide the postseason, not a committee.

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