Leave the college football postseason alone for once, OK? Plus: CFB 26 cover athletes revealed

Since the early 1990s, top-level college football has had the following championship formats. Mind you, this is just a basic summary:

• The Bowl Coalition, a 1992-94 attempt to establish an actual championship game within the bowl system … but without having the Big Ten, Pac-10 or Rose Bowl as partners. Kinda important partners.
• The Bowl Alliance, the 1995-97 proto-BCS that still didn’t include the Rose club.
• The 1998-2013 BCS, which changed more or less annually for a while there.
• The four-team College Football Playoff, which looks like a miraculous decade of stability in hindsight.
• Last season’s new 12-team CFP, which had to be re-explained to fans in every broadcast all season long, aaaand then immediately changed again.
• The anticipated 14-team CFP, which had looked like it might include a major change (automatic bids for power leagues) …
• … and is already morphing into a potential 16-teamer, as Ralph Russo reported last week.

In that same span of over three decades, the NFL has added all of two spots to its tournament. The NBA and March Madness have each added a handful on the margins, resolved outside the main brackets. Pretty easy to follow along with … and more importantly, to catch up on.

Know how we all have friends who are casually interested in college football, but who still ask things like, “Who’s gonna be in the BCS this year?” Well, imagine explaining this postseason format to that friend (via Ralph’s story):

“Growing the field to 16 would open up a possible alternative to (four automatic bids each for the Big Ten and SEC, plus two each for the ACC and Big 12, leaving just two other spots) by giving the Big 12 and ACC an extra auto-bid, but with stipulations. The Big 12 and ACC’s third AQs in a 4-4-3-3-1-1 model would have to reach a minimum selection-committee ranking — possibly No. 18 — to make the Playoff. If not, those would become at-large spots, open to teams from any conference.”

There are Metal Gear storylines easier to follow. Remember last season, when the mid-January title game felt alien even to those of us who’d known for a year that it was coming? Now imagine some really weird stuff happening around No. 18 in this format.

To an extent, I get it. There is no caretaker of this sport, though the Big Ten and SEC enjoy their status as the figureheads of the co-commissioners (Fox and ESPN). And the process of installing a tournament within such a long-decentralized sport was always going to be a mess. But it’s now been 33 years and counting since the Bowl Coalition began, already over half as much time as the preceding polls-and-bowls era.

Basically, there are lots of us who are tired of annually re-learning college football’s postseason in order to help it make sense to people who are focused on their jobs that are actually important to society. Imagine the tranquillity of watching a single month of an FBS postseason that isn’t a referendum on itself.

Just pick a postseason format and let it actually exist. Stop fussing. Light somewhere. Set it and forget it. At this point, I don’t even care what you pick. I’d prefer a Rose Bowl-centric system without 10,000 auto-bids for the Big Ten, but at this point, who cares? Throw a dart at the board, and then don’t even look at the board. Someone will arrive to collect the board from your hands. Hand it over. It’s OK. You can let go of it. Oh, I know. You want to tinker with it one last time. No. It’s OK. Let go now. Shh. Let go. Hush.

More CFP:

• “Nearly everyone The Athletic has spoken to about this subject over the past few months says this entire cockamamie scheme is the brainchild of Tony Petitti, the third-year Big Ten commissioner who used to be a television executive.” — Stewart Mandel, who says these plans are “only getting more nonsensical”
• SEC commissioner Greg Sankey acknowledged yesterday that automatic bids could actually work against his conference.

OK, that’s all for today. Email me at untilsaturday@theathletic.com with any thoughts! Last week, Henry wrote in to request more Nebraska appreciation. Looking into it. For now, I mean this emoji with my whole heart: 🌽.

Last week’s most-clicked: Bruce Feldman’s list of the 25 best CFB players from the year 2000 onward, with Reggie Bush at No. 2.