The people who fought tooth and nail against college football scrapping the old Bowl Championship Series (BCS) and moving to a four-team Playoff, as it turns out, may have known what they were doing.
Not because the now-six-year-old College Football Playoff hasn’t been a massive cash cow for the sport; it has. But what they predicted has inevitably come to pass: a four-team playoff eventually would lead to a larger playoff. As Pete Thamel reports, expansion to 12 or 16 teams is currently on the table.
The potential need for another cash infusion in the wake of COVID-19 is the trigger, but the problems with the four-team Playoff were obvious from the jump, when the 2014 Playoff Committee found a way to sneak one-loss Ohio State in ahead of one-loss Baylor and TCU, ostensibly because Ohio State flexed its muscles in a 59-0 win over Wisconsin in the Big Ten championship game; but anybody who is aware of the helmet bias long present in college football immediately jumped to more nefarious explanations.