If you watched college football this season and followed the saga that was the weekly College Football Playoff selection show, you know the system is a broken one.
I would argue, even, that it’s more broken now than it was during the 2-team BCS era.
The idea was a good one: create a play-in championship structure that would get rid of the annual arguments surrounding who should play in the championship game. But what it’s done, and it didn’t take long for this to happen, is continue the same “who should get in arguments,” elevate the top programs in the country even further and allow for the committee to change its criteria every season in order to confirm their own biases of who are the nation’s best teams.
It’s a mess right now, and nobody summed up the mess better than The Athletic’s Nicole Auerbach back in mid-December.
Don’t call it a playoff. Call it what it really is: an invitational.
And drop every pretense of fairness.
My column on a College Football Playoff selection process that is broken: https://t.co/ibziZ4lotD
— Nicole Auerbach 😷 (@NicoleAuerbach) December 17, 2020
So how can it be fixed? How does the sport move towards a real “playoff” and away from a yearly invitational?
Here are five steps to make that happen: