By all accounts and measures, the new, expanded 12-team College Football Playoff was a resounding success, especially if you had rooting interests cloaked in the colors Scarlet and Gray. After all, winning a national championship tends to leave you with fond opinions of the format.
Not only did we see the first-ever on-campus CFP games, but we saw some pretty magnificent matchups, and even some upsets along the way in crowning a national champion. It was everything most fans wanted, and more. Heck, even traditionalists seemed to get on board by the end of it.
But like everything in college football these days, things are more than likely to change with the CFP format. There are talks about expanding even further to 16 teams to give more access to teams and programs that wouldn’t otherwise, and with that, the powers that be are circling the wagons, looking to help guide the CFP Committee on what should happen.
One of those things that will need to be hammered out is what teams receive automatic bids to the playoff. Right now, recent history would say that the Big Ten and SEC are the power brokers of the sport, and because of that, Ohio State head coach Ryan Day believes his conference deserves the benefit of the doubt and somewhat preferential treatment when it comes to whatever format is settled upon.
While sitting down for an interview with ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg, Day said that the Big Ten deserves multiple teams in the CFP every year as staple to whatever is ironed out, and not just two teams. He went even further.
“We’re in the Big Ten, and we have 18 teams and some of the best programs in the country,” Day told Rittenberg. “I feel like we deserve at least four automatic qualifiers.”
Day pointed to recent expansion that brought really quality programs from the West Coast as another reason for his comments.
“You would have had at least a team or two [in the CFP] from out there,” Day said, referring to the original Pac-12. “So it only makes sense when you have 18 teams, especially the quality of teams that you would have [in] that many teams representing the Big Ten.”
Not only that, but the Ohio State head coach also believes that having automatic qualifiers will lead to juicier matchups during the regular-season nonconference, like the game between the Buckeyes and Texas Longhorns this year.
“If you don’t have those automatic qualifiers, you’re less likely to play a game like we’re playing this year against Texas, because it just won’t make sense,” Day said. “If we do, then you’re more likely to do that, because we play nine conference games in the Big Ten. The SEC doesn’t. So it’s not equal.”
He has a point there. The SEC has always thought that simply playing in the land of sweet tea and grits would qualify a team for a stronger schedule and a more deserving path than elsewhere. However, the devil’s advocate in all of this is the cyclical nature of the sport. The Big Ten may have closed the gap and surpassed the SEC the last couple of years and are clearly two of the most competitive and rich leagues (along with the SEC) in the sport, but what if things change in the future.
It wasn’t that long ago when the Big Ten was suffering from a perception problem with Ohio State seemingly the only program that was ever in the mix for a national championship. At some point, the most deserving and most qualified teams have to have access to a playoff, and I for one can’t see providing automatic qualifications beyond winning a league title for the Big Ten, SEC, or the other power conferences.
But hey, money talks and right now the Big Ten makes more revenue than any other league out there, so maybe Day and the rest of the league can kind of control the river rather than the river’s rapids taking them to whatever shore it wants to land on.
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