Well, this isn’t surprising at all, is it?

You read that correctly. The folks who brought you the twelve team College Football playoff are in fact kicking around the notion of a fourteen or sixteen team playoff. They’re doing that before the first twelve team iteration has even been played.

Being a College Football fan in this era of expanding mega conferences and expanding playoffs is enough to make the traditionalist among us scream to the heavens, “Why!?!?! Whhyyyyyy!?!?!?”

It all makes sense once you come to terms with a very important shift in the college football landscape. College football games are not designed to promote school spirit and physical fitness as they were in the early 1900s. They aren’t held as a staging point for booster donations and to increase enrollment as they were in the 1990s. College football as currently practiced, at least at its highest level, is designed to be packaged as content for the television networks.

Our favorite team, your most bitter rivalry, and your sacred traditions are irrelevant to the folks at ESPN except to the extent they can be packaged as content. They are valued in proportion to their worth on the open content market.

I’m not saying a 16 team playoff is bad. To the extent that it means consequential college football throughout December, it’s a net positive. But, and I know this has become a bit of a running theme on this site in the past couple of years, there’s only so far this particular rubber band can be stretched.

A fourteen team, single elimination playoff bracket would presumably give the top two seeds first round byes. The main difference between that and a twelve team playoff would be that the #3 and #4 seeds would be empaneled to play in the first round against the newly added #13 and #14 seeds. Again, this is about content. About mining more gridiron coal to shovel into the television furnace.

Again, that’s great until it isn’t. There comes a point where the players’ bodies and willingness as non-professionals to go play 16-17 football games gives out. A point at which fans’ wallets cry uncle and we’re treated to the sight of a half-empty stadium at a playoff game. A point where the universities’ hunger for cash outstrips what the networks are willing to pay.

It’s ever more clear that the powers that be in college football aren’t going to stop until they find where that breaking point is. They won’t pause for reflection at the edge of the precipice. They’re going to go right over the edge with cash in both hands.

Until later…

Go ‘Dawgs!!!