Photo: Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images
It is highly unlikely that Bill Hancock, the longtime executive director of the College Football Playoff, has ever read D.H. Lawrence. But he and the men who have been in charge of college football over the last few decades share a single-minded maxim with the moaning house in Lawrence’s famous short story The Rocking-Horse Winner: “There must be more money.”
“College football has never fulfilled its potential, in terms of fan interest across the country,” Hancock said this week. That statement, more than anything, has become the sport’s creed. No matter how great things may be going, there is always still room for the sport to expand. No matter how big the sport gets, no matter how many ways it transmogrifies itself to maximize revenue and influence, no matter how far away it gets from its initial mission, everyone agrees that there has to be more meat to peel off the bone. You’ve got to keep riding the rocking horse as hard as you can. Even if it kills you.
So over the last 25 years, college football has kept stretching out its arms, lowering its shoulders and manspreading. In 1998, a sport that, astoundingly, had always determined its champion by letting journalists vote on it at last created a national championship game that whittled the 100-plus top-level college football teams down to two. That game became more and more popular over the next 15 years, which inevitably (after a decade of in-fighting) led to a four-team tournament, which commenced in 2015. That resulted in another decade of in-fighting about how to add even more teams to, and wring even more money out of, this golden goose.
It all culminated this year with a season that everyone agrees worked out almost perfectly. After contentious arguments over seeding principles and a first round that featured four blowouts — but which was redeemed by the playing of games on college campuses rather than in a generic NFL stadium, — the inaugural year of the College Football Playoff has delivered banger after banger. In the quarterfinals, we witnessed the dingy, sweaty glory of Cam Skattebo, the end of nearly every hated SEC team’s season, and massive games every night leading up to New Years. (Television ratings actually doubled between rounds.) The semifinals featured two classics: Notre Dame beating Penn State in a wild rock fight and Ohio State defeating Texas on a final-minute 83-yard strip-sack touchdown. Then, on Monday night, a weary nation (well, 48.4 percent of it, anyway) did everything it could to pretend nothing else was happening in the world and watched two of the five biggest brands in the sport, Ohio State and Notre Dame, play for the national title. The game didn’t turn out as compelling as boosters might have hoped — Ohio State blitzed out to a 31-7 lead and then shifted into cruise control to hold onto a 34-34 victory for their first national championship in 11 years — but it will likely end up as one of the most-watched games in college sports history. The College Football Playoff has been going on for so long now, more than a month, that it feels like a season entirely of itself. Monday night was the much-anticipated season finale.
It was an immensely satisfying season and a fantastic inaugural playoff. Those in charge could not possibly have asked for more. Which means of course they’re already doing exactly that.
Talk at Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Monday night centered around all the changes college presidents, chancellors and (most important) the network executives who are paying for this are already planning on making. Some of these, such as a tweak to the CFP’s seeding principles, may be happening as quickly as next year. But the bigger alteration may be coming in 2026, when the CFP’s new television contract kicks off and — as negotiated in that contract — the Big Ten and the SEC gain near-total control over how the playoffs are structured moving forward. More accurately: Fox (which owns the Big Ten television contract) and ESPN/Disney (which owns the SEC television contract) will begin their push to expand to 14 or 16 teams, with explicit preference given to teams from those two conferences, conferences that already have most of the power in the sport — to the point that teams like Florida State and Clemson have been actively working to get out of the ACC and into one of those. As the sport slouches toward even further brand-name concentration, it becomes more and more likely we end up with only those two conferences, an NFL-type system that pushes out anything but brand names, drains the sport of the traditions that have always made it special and essentially turns it into minor league NFL. What happened to Washington State and Oregon State, schools that were left out of the realignment merry-go-round because they didn’t get high enough TV ratings? Their fate may be the future for anyone but the 48, or maybe even 32, schools that don’t explicitly bring in casual fan eyeballs. That means you, Syracuse, or you, Missouri, or maybe even you, Illinois. This is the sports’ existential disaster scenario. And the success of this playoff makes that endgame more likely, not less.
After all, this first year of the playoff, and conference realignment, was always going to be a sugar rush, with fun new conference matchups — Texas-Georgia! Oregon-Ohio State! Alabama-Oklahoma — and a novel playoff format we’d never seen before. You’d have to be made of stone not to have a blast; it’s no wonder the ratings shot up. But the short term was never the problem in college football: After all, the short term is all the sport has ever worried about. Eventually, the novelty of these matchups and this playoff format will wear off, like everything else does. (The NFL changed its playoff format just five years ago and most people can’t even remember what it was like before.) And once you’ve drained the freshness out of these matchups — and paid for the privilege by siphoning off any teams that don’t give the whippets-high of immediate television ratings — what do you have? The fun of this year will be less fun next year, and less fun after that, until eventually the sport will run out of buttons to push. And they’ll have lost their tradition and vitality in the process.
That this year’s playoff was such a success — and it truly was — seemed inevitable. But you can only pump this prime, or rock this horse, for so long. “ [College football] always has had room for improvement,” Hancock said. “I think the 12-team Playoff, the expanded Playoff, has already led to improvement, and I think it will lead to more.” There must be more money. There must be more money. Nobody tell Hancock, or anyone else in college football, how that D.H. Lawrence story ends.
