Whether you want a four team college football playoff or an eight team college football playoff is not relevant. Because an eight team bracket is coming. Maybe not in 2016 or 2017, but it’s going to happen. Sooner rather than later.
ESPN paid $6 billion for the right to broadcast the college football playoff every year until 2026. That’s why the World Wide Leader has bludgeoned us all over the head in promoting the title game; just as they incessantly plugged the two national semi-finals. They need to get a return on their six billion dollar investment.
So far, the ratings numbers indicate a great ROI. So it’s natural to assume tonight will be an extrapolation; as would an eight team college football playoff.
Or as Bill Walton more succinctly put it:
“Why don’t they have eight teams instead of four? Who makes the call on that, (ESPN President) John Skipper? He should. He’s the one paying the bills!”
Walton made these comments while calling UCLA versus Stanford on Thursday night. He became inspired to talk gridiron, instead of hoops, after ESPN ran yet another promo of their broadcast of tonight’s college football playoff final.
Then later, Walton pulled a Brent Musburger when the UCLA dance team appeared. (video here). He also talked quite a bit about trees and sweetgrass.
Yes, Walton was indeed in rare form that night; even by his lofty standards. Since he publicized the conspiracy theory of every college football message board you’ve ever been on in your life, I’m guessing the black helicopters came for Walton soon after the game concluded.
Still, when you have one of the most well known ESPN personalities, on a live game broadcast no less, espousing the same ideas as Geaux2007Tigers2003 on TigerDroppings.com, it’s not a conspiracy anymore.
The NCAA is not in charge. Mark Emmert is not in charge. The SEC, yes, even the SEC, is not in charge.
As they say in politics, “follow the money.” When this much money is at stake, postseason expansion is imminent.
If you’re going to fight the move from four to eight, then you probably were a BCS “dead-ender” too. And before that, maybe you were one of the crusty curmudgeons swimming against the current of computer rankings.
ESPN’s Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit discussed this topic on media conference call.
“I’ve been a long time playoff proponent, I think eight teams makes sense, in a sport that moves glacially, and is extremely conservative, this is pretty revolutionary,” said Fowler.
Moving at a glacial place. Arch-conservative. Indeed this is college football. We all complained about the BCS mess, but what about the even messier, archaic system that came before it? My older readers can recall when say #2 would play #4 in a Fiesta Bowl on New Year’s night with the national title crowned a week later when the UPI and AP polls were released.
“It was a long time coming, but I’d like to see how it works. I think over time they’ll go to eight, but I’d like to see how four works for awhile,” said Fowler.
(side note, Fowler also pointed out how this is the first “national title game” perhaps ever, at least since 1988, without a southern team in it)
Said Herbstreit:
“Four is a good place to start, I think it’s natural for people to jump to conclusions that it will go eight.”
“It’s very convenient with the power five conferences, then you throw in the group of five, maybe the highest ranked team and that gets you to six, and then find two quote unquote at-large teams to get you to eight. It’s very natural to assume that it might eventually get there.”
With ESPN going all out to market the college football playoff the way they have, expect tonight’s game to do NFL postseason kind of numbers. Both the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl semi-finals did 28 million viewers a piece. That’s NFL postseason ratings. NBC Sports sent out a self-congratulatory mass mailing about how Saturday’s Baltimore Ravens versus New England Patriots contest did 34 million viewers, making it “the third most watched AFC Divisional Saturday postseason game in history.”
Putting forth the time and effort to BRAG about finishing third in a category that has not one, not two, but three qualifying specifications? NBC engages in this kind of pointlessness with regularity. That best sums up why NBC is no competition at all to ESPN.
Bristol must secretly be laughing their asses off when they see NBC take such unintentionally hilarious actions.
(Of course, CBS, FOX, and even ESPN itself do this all the time too: cherry-picking Nielsen numbers to craft some inane and irrelevant self-congratulatory narrative about ratings that no one outside of their own network cares about. These press releases would make great internal memos. However, they’re not of interest to news providers/consumers.)
(Sure enough, CBS had sent out a similar chest-thumping “third most watched AFC Divisional Playoff game on a Saturday” release by the time this post went live. And within 24 hours, FOX had sent out one of their own, and ESPN had sent out three in a similar vein!)
Back to Herbstreit and the college football playoff expansion.
“If you’re going to 8 or 16, you’re always going to have some teams that are left out and frustrated. Just like in March, you have 68 teams and there always two or three teams that are frustrated about having their bubble burst. I think that’s always going to be there.”
He’s right. Controversy will always be there.
It’s why you tuned into the ESPN selection show last month. You wanted only to see who #4 would be.
Not just ESPN, but the entire sports media industry lives, eats, sleeps, drinks and breathes controversy. Debate and discussion make “good copy.” It’s especially true in college football. It’s a sport where nothing was ever actually settled for decades. Controversy is interwoven within the entire fabric of the sport and its history of champions.
So with all this money that ESPN has invested, and all this money to be made, change is inevitable. The eight team college football playoff is coming. With it, even more controversy. Nothing will ever truly be “settled.” Because no one actually wants it to ever be settled.
See ya in 2019! We’ll do this again where we talk about the forth-coming 16 team college football playoff.
And then of course, you always have the “east coast bias” at work at ESPN. Which led to the famous joke of Eastern Seaboard Programming Network.” More on that here.
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and writes The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with Fox Sports, Yardbarker Network, eBay and CBS Interactive Inc.
You can read Banks’ feature stories in the Chicago Tribune RedEye edition and listen to him on KOZN 1620 The Zone. Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks)