A 12-team CFB Playoff? It's Way Overdue and Will Reap Benefits

NCAA to decide this week in Chicago whether to expand college football's postseason.

For six weeks of the 1982 college football season, a Don James-coached University of Washington team sat atop the Associated Press poll, with the Huskies ranked No. 1 for the first time in school history.

This lofty standing lasted until a late-season game in Palo Alto, California, where Stanford and elite quarterback John Elway brought the UW back to Earth with a 43-31 beatdown on national TV.

It was just about that time — 40 years ago — when the calls for an extended college football playoff first began. Now-defunct Sport Magazine even laid out a 16-team format for its readers to digest and picked the Huskies to survive this fantasy gauntlet by beating Florida in a proposed national championship matchup.

So here we are again, considering expansion from a four-team postseason gathering that might as well be called the Southern or SEC Sweepstakes. It primarily caters to a limited number of college football programs situated in a far-flung corner of the country.

While this setup meets the full approval of people from Alabama to Louisiana, it does nothing to appease the rest of the country. 

It has become boring.

We're not suggesting that the SEC doesn't deserve to win most of the national championships, considering its maniacal levels of team devotion and financial backing, but more leagues need the opportunity to be involved.

More people need to care.

It's like the NCAA basketball tournament, when UCLA captured 10 of 12 titles through 1975 and began to turn that event into a snooze fest. 

The college basketball tourney was expanded to 64 teams in 1985 and, all of a sudden, everyone had an interest in it. Sure, the blue bloods such as Duke and Kentucky kept winning a larger share of the titles. Yet the prospect of some lesser entity pulling an upset and having a better chance of winning it all put everyone on board.

For seven years, the NCAA has settled its football national championship with a four-team playoff — one that included Washington in 2016 — that evolved from an initial two-game competition and was preceded by a straight poll vote before that.

At one time, major college football was the only team sport, pro or collegiate, that didn't use some sort of extended playoff to crown a champion. 

NCAA Division II football has been able use a full bracket and no one complains or can't keep up.

The big argument against postseason football expansion for the Power 5s and others was the need to preserve the bowls.

Well, nobody goes to most of those games. They're basically made for ESPN-TV holiday scheduling.

Washington played in front of maybe 12,000 people at a Louisiana high school stadium against Tulane in the 1987 Independence Bowl. The Huskies opened that season at home against Stanford in front of 73,676 fans. That postseason was such a farce.

A larger playoff system, using more bowls in an alternating fashion, would put a lot more fans in the seats and make everything a little more relevant for college football.

What about the challenges of maintaining the physical health of the athletes in a longer season?

The NFL is now using a 17-game schedule, and pro-bound college players might find themselves better prepared to withstand the rigors of a longer season.

Meeting in Chicago this week, the NCAA will vote on whether to approve a proposed 12-team configuration, one that would reward the top four seeded teams with opening-round byes.

More league champions would be included in this sort of format, a just reward. Hey, more SEC teams might qualify for a postseason that counts for something. Teams won't need to go unbeaten.

Incoming Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff declared that expanding the football playoffs was his leading agenda when he accepted the job.

Nice work, George.

It might not take long.

There is plenty of reason now for the Pac-12 and other leagues to complain about not being a regular part of the four-team playoff.

If this expansion passes, and you still can't qualify for a 12-team playoff, you've really got a problem.

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