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College football coaches don’t want toughness anymore — they want insurance
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- College football coaches don’t want toughness anymore — they want insurance
This used to be a profession of tough guys .
So I heard, anyway.
The profession of two-a-days, and rub some dirt on it, and give me one more !
You can read all about it in a library book.
Here in present day, college football coaches have gone soft.
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Many of them want participation ribbons .
Toppmeyer: Big Ten football took the SEC's power. Then, it broke the SEC's brain
Hayes: A 24-team playoff is not progress. It's college football's surrender
"Future playoff models should maximize the number of participants," the American Football Coaches Association said in a statement this week.
While not specifying a desired number, the AFCA's embrace of max participation comes across as a nod toward 24-team playoff models under discussion.
College Football Coaches Inc. — OK, there's no group actually called that — seems to want to grow the playoff to such a size that 8-4 teams that creep into the bottom tier of the Top 25 poll qualify for the bracket.
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Place eighth in the SEC, collect your ribbon, and proceed to a first-round playoff loss.
Never mind that a 24-team playoff would devalue the regular season, which has always been the best part of college football.
A 24-team College Football Playoff would boost 8-4 teams
Lose to every ranked opponent on your schedule? That'd be no biggie in a 24-team playoff era. Just scarf down a few cupcake wins, add in some victories against a handful of mediocre Power conference teams, and it's off to the playoff.
Apparently, it's not enough that James Madison and Tulane and eventually Alabama and Oregon got walloped in College Football Playoff games. What this playoff's really missing is four-loss Iowa!
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Look, no offense to Iowa, but what's wrong with Iowa finishing its season with a ReliaQuest Bowl victory on New Year's Eve against Vanderbilt, a fellow also-ran?
Answer: Nothing's wrong with that. Nothing's been wrong with that for a century.
Before you say nobody cares about bowl games, I'd direct you to TV ratings that say, in fact, people do still watch bowl games. (The good bowl games, anyway.)
Some bowl games attracted a bigger TV audience last winter than certain playoff games.
Calling something a playoff game doesn't ensure demand. I don't need to see No. 23 Iowa lose to No. 10 Miami in the first round of a playoff consisting of five rounds and 24 teams.
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College football fans don't want this. This idea of a 24-team playoff originated from Big Ten HQ, but a recent polling of nearly 3,600 Big Ten fans by The Athletic showed only 9% of respondents favor a 24-team playoff.
A whopping 84% of respondents favored either a 12- or 16-team playoff.
But, hey, Coach knows best, right?
Finishing season sooner is worthy goal, but not like this
Fortunately, the AFCA has no authority over the CFP.
Anyway, give it a few weeks, and coaches might change their mind. Just last month, the NCAA's Football Oversight Committee, which includes some coaches, came out in favor of moving up the season's start date to what's now known as Week 0, while also enshrining two bye weeks per season .
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Then, weeks later, the AFCA announced it prefers one bye week, not two.
Ask 'em again next week, and they'll favor infinity bye weeks, before proceeding to a 128-team playoff.
What's next, contract extensions and raises for coaches who lose a playoff game by 35 points? Oops, too late, that already happens .
One of the AFCA's goals, it says, is to finish the season by the second Monday in January while also growing the playoff. To do that, the AFCA sketched out eliminating conference championship games and limiting the schedule to one bye week.
But there's another way to speed up the season's conclusion:
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Step 1: Keep the playoff at 12 teams, or expand to 16 while eliminating playoff byes. Cap the playoff at four rounds.
Step 2: Eliminate conference championship games. Start the playoff the first weekend of December.
But no, the AFCA wants max participation.
A 24-team playoff could include more than one-third of the Power Four teams.
Why some coaches like idea of 24-team CFP
Why do coaches want a max-participation playoff? Don't kid yourself into thinking they've got altruistic motives. This preference stems from a well-oiled place of self-interest.
Coaches want more playoff teams — maximum participation! — because in their mind, that'll work to their benefit.
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You can't fire me if I'm coaching in a playoff game! (We'll see about that.)
Texas A&M coach Mike Elko spelled this out beautifully when I sat down with him last month for an interview.
"The head coach who wants to keep his job, (he'll say) the right size is 45 teams or however many we can possibly fit in it," Elko told me, "because (making the playoff) is becoming such a marker for the premier programs, which is, either you're in, or you're out. And if you're out, you failed."
Elko, we should note, expressed hesitance toward doubling the size of the playoff, saying "you have to keep the regular season meaningful" and adding that "we cannot turn this into college basketball."
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Apparently, not everybody's gone soft.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network's senior national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer .
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: College football's playoff debate isn't about fairness — it's about fear
