As the College Football Playoff enters its seventh year with its most controversial selection to date, we’ve reached a point at which the only plausible reason anyone can come up with for why the powers that be decided to scrap the BCS and replace it with a four-team playoff is money.
Because in terms of the actual impact on the sport itself, depending on what your goal was, the outcome is either “nothing has changed” or “this is actively worse than the BCS.”
If you want to make an argument for the College Football Playoff, that argument mostly centers around the fact that in a year like 2019, when three Power 5 teams (LSU, Ohio State, and Clemson) managed to get through the regular season unscathed, the Playoff was able to include all three, and watching LSU drown Oklahoma in one semifinal was undoubtedly worth it to make sure that Ohio State and Clemson both got a shot, where the BCS would have had to choose just one of the two while the other, assuming it won its bowl game, would have had a long offseason to seethe over its exclusion from the championship game.