After a couple of blowouts in the first round of the College Football Playoff, fans across the nation ripped the new 12-team format, blaming it for the uncompetitive showdowns. On Sunday, FOX Sports’ Joel Klatt fired back at the 12-team CFP’s naysayers.
“College football right now is amazing,” Klatt said. “This weekend should have been a celebration of that. Really good teams hosting playoff games in incredible environments. I don’t really care who the opponents are, because, quite frankly, in a 12-team playoff, like we have now, there’s going to be flawed teams that get in.
“Whether it’s Indiana because of their strength of schedule, or SMU because of their strength of schedule, with only one loss each. …Or if you’re looking at a three-loss team from the SEC, whether It’s Alabama or Ole Miss or South Carolina — those are flawed teams.
“This idea that all the sudden, because Notre Dame beat Indiana handily, and Penn State beat SMU handily, all of a sudden, it was an indictment on those programs and an indictment on the playoff. I took issue with that.”
In the opening weekend of the CFP, Ohio State defeated Tennessee 42-18 and Penn State dominated SMU 38-10. While the other two opening-round games were more competitive, they both ended with the winners securing double-digit margins of victory.
Alas, Klatt claims that lopsided final scores don’t indicate an issue with the CFP itself. In fact, he pointed to the history of the playoff and other postseason examples to further emphasize his point.
“These types of margins that we experienced in the first round of the college football playoff happen all the time,” Klatt said. “It’s been happening in the College Football Playoff in the four-team model forever. We’ve had some absolute duds for the semifinals and in the championship game.
“We’ve had large margins forever in our sport. And by the way, there’s large margins in the NFL as well. If you look at last year’s Wild Card round of the NFL playoffs, it wasn’t good. It wasn’t good, and yet, I didn’t hear anybody start yelling and screaming about, ‘The Eagles don’t deserve to be in the playoffs!’
Last year, the average final score margin in the NFL Wildcard round games was 17.5 points. Like in this year’s CFP, those games were played on the higher-ranked team’s home field. Klatt noted that if teams like Penn State and SMU met on neutral ground instead of in Happy Valley, the games might not have been ended in blowouts.
“I wish that the rhetoric would have been different,” Klatt said. “I wish it would have been more responsible. To be candid, I felt like it was irresponsible, and it was coming from some really prominent places and I was frustrated by that.”
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