College Football Playoff’s ‘entrenched’ resistance to change is downright stupid

Maybe the problem is us, those of who still tune in in droves every Saturday (and Friday, and Thursday, and Wednesday), those of us who still enjoy college football, still care about it, still enjoy the color and the pageantry, the hyperbole and the hypocrisy, all the things that make college football … well, college football.

Our problem is that we keep expecting a sport that sets its watch glacially to start thinking digitally. We keep hoping college football will someday take a great quantum leap forward into the 2020s, while so much of its sense and sensibility still seems locked in the ’70s.

“We have entrenched issues that are no closer to being resolved,” Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said after the College Football Playoff Committee met and adjourned Monday without reaching consensus on an expanded playoff system.

“Entrenched” has been college football’s abiding issue for years, for decades — for a century, if we’re being honest. Nowhere has change been more feared, where progress has been more shunned. Somehow, the sport crept out of the Dark Ages a few years ago and offered up this four-team playoff format that yielded an Alabama-Georgia SEC grudge match Monday night at Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium.

The four-team system is a good thing only if you compare it to what came immediately before it — the two-team BCS — and what preceded it to the beginning of time, a system of random bowls and random postseason that sometimes brought the best teams together but more often allowed two voting bodies — the AP, made up of sportswriters, and the UPI (later USA Today), made up of coaches — to determine the national champ.

And, sometimes, two national champs.

Of course that was an absurd way to determine a champion, but that system was allowed to exist for years, for decades, for damn near a century. So, yes, what we have now is better.

But only in the sense that dial-up internet was better than no internet at all.

It is so clear that a 12-team playoff would benefit the sport in manifold ways — and yet the committee cannot figure a way to pull the trigger. Monday’s stalemate was just the last example of aggravation.

“We’re going into overtime,” executive director Bill Hancock said. And while Hancock is one of the last genuine optimists left on the planet, the harder truth is this: Change, if it comes at all, is likely not to come until the current CFP deal is up in 2026. It was hoped the committee could move that date up to 2024. That hope has dimmed.

And that’s a shame.

College football really has done a remarkable job the last few years of finally trying to catch up to the times. Some of it was forced, such as name, image and likeness rights. Some of it is still hard to digest, notably the eternally spinning transfer portal. Some is conceding to common sense — the idea that “class time” was a factor when most colleges are on break for much of December and early January was always laughable.

A 12-team playoff makes so much sense it almost hurts your brain to think otherwise. All the Power Five conferences would be represented, and would likely each have a shot at at-large bids, too. The Group of Five conferences — which finally landed Cincinnati in the CFP this year — would have a seat at the table. Notre Dame’s independence would still result in bids if the Irish were worthy.

And everyone would make a bucket of money.

“Everybody is more concerned about their own silo than everybody else’s,” Bowlsby said, and in a time of great upheaval in the sport that’s understandable. And the fact that bowl games that have ruled college football roost for years might be further subjugated is another competing silo.

Still, progress is progress. Common sense is common sense. And the fact that the men who run college football can’t agree on something that just about anyone outside their small circle would be in favor of? That’s worse than entrenched. That’s downright stupid.