The Alabama Crimson Tide and Georgia Bulldogs are preparing for their rematch in the College Football Playoff national championship game on Jan. 10.
However, it seems as though everyone seems to be weighing on on potential expansion. You can call it SEC exhaustion, or even blowout exhaustion. Whichever narrative you want to roll with, media members and others want to discuss how to fix it. On Monday when speaking with the media, former LSU and current Alabama head coach Nick Saban was asked about expansion and if it was a solution to blowouts.
“I don’t know that expanding — if this is the best four teams and they played each other,” Saban said. “I don’t see the logic in it if we had more teams there would be better games. I don’t know how that adds up.
But I am really not in a position to answer that. There’s a lot of other good teams, whether it was their consistency in performance or whatever happened to them in championship games or whatever, that may have had the opportunity to get in the playoffs that didn’t.”
What Saban speaks to makes a lot of sense if you really think about it. Would expanding to eight teams or even 12 prevent the same four teams from playing in the final four? That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t expand because at this point it is less of a playoff and more of an invitational.
Should the committee and FBS conference commissioners come to an agreement on expansion, conference champions should be involved at the Power Five level. There also needs to be some representation among the at-large bids. Such as a Georgia team that didn’t win the SEC or Oklahoma State that fell to Baylor.
As far as the blowouts, this isn’t something new and it speaks to the talent gap between the top two teams and who they play. For example, when the LSU Tigers played Oklahoma in 2019, the game wasn’t even close as they beat the Sooners by 35 points. We saw Alabama beat Cincinnati by 21 and Georgia beat Michigan by 23.
Even with more times, the semifinals will likely continue to be blowouts. Looking at the recruiting rankings, you will see that the SEC dominates. The 2022 rankings show that the conference has the top three spots with Texas A&M, Alabama, and Georgia. They also have 10 of the top 20 recruiting classes.
Until other teams show they can get better talent, we might continue to see this trend of blowout games in the semifinals.