A classic college football offseason conversation is in full swing yet again as the momentum for potential College Football Playoff expansion seems to be picking up more steam. Recently, the CFP management committee discussed numerous different possibilities for expanding the number of the teams in the annual playoff out from four to as many as possibly 16 teams.
A change in the format isn’t likely extremely imminent, with any changes at a minimum of 2-3 years away. But, it feels like change is coming eventually as the criticism of the current system grows louder and louder with each passing year.
Someone who agrees with that notion is Oklahoma head coach Lincoln Riley, who said he feels like expansion is certainly on the way in the near future.
“I guess it feels a little bit inevitable that it’s probably going to move at some point,” Riley said on Thursday in a zoom press conference.
Similar to his reasoning a couple years ago on this subject, Riley really likes the idea of allowing every major conference champion in with an automatic bid and sees that as really the most legitimate reason for expansion.
“There’s several different routes that it could go but the one spot to me I think is the individual conference champions,” Riley said. “It’s hard to imagine that not including an automatic bid. Every conference is different, every conference plays a different amount of conference games, competition is different, the conference championship structures are remarkably different. Ours (Big 12) is the most difficult.”
In his mind, it is harder now than ever to decipher between conferences which teams stand above the rest due to different structures of the leagues. So, providing an automatic bid to each conference with some at-large spots answers a lot of those issues.
“Just, it’s so hard to compare these teams so I mean I think I could see that being a positive move for all conferences, potentially having some at-larges,” Riley said.
While Riley does like the idea of expansion, he admitted it is a fine line on letting the tournament become too large and beginning to affect the current bowl system and wreak havoc on the academic calendar.
“I do believe we have to be careful of it getting too big,” Riley said. “You know because you do have an academic calendar to work around. I think the bowl games which you can’t get too far away from. Just because they are such an integral part of our games history and they’re so important to so many different regions and I think really important to college football. So I think we need to do everything we can within it to protect those as well.”
Time will tell if expansion does end up coming to fruition sometime soon, but it seems like more and more momentum is being picked up for it with each passing year. Riley, certainly a big voice in the sport, is one of many that support the change.
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