College football’s biggest voices have declared war on Cinderella stories

James Madison and Tulane play their College Football Playoff games this weekend, and if you’ve been paying attention to the discourse around these teams, you’d think they committed some kind of crime by winning their conferences.

Nobody’s talking about the games themselves. Nobody’s building storylines around the players or coaches. All anyone wants to discuss is whether JMU and Tulane deserve to be there in the first place. And that leads us to the prevailing sentiment among the sport’s biggest voices — Kirk Herbstreit and Joel Klatt — that JMU and Tulane don’t belong, that nobody wants to see them play, and that their presence in the playoff is solely to avoid antitrust litigation.

“We’re not looking for a Cinderella,” Klatt said on The Next Round podcast. “Nobody cares in football about James Madison, or the equivalent of George Mason going to the Final Four. Nobody cares in football about that. We don’t want Cinderellas. We want the best teams playing each other at the end.”

Klatt and Herbstreit constantly position themselves as voices of the fans, speaking up for what people actually want to see. But fans love underdogs. Fans love Cinderella stories. Fans love watching the scrappy team shock the powerhouse. Klatt and Herbstreit are siding with Coca-Cola over the mom-and-pop soda shop, then acting confused when people point out they’re carrying water for the biggest brands in the sport.

Herbstreit has been particularly vocal about this. This week on his Nonstop show with Joey Galloway, he called automatic qualifiers “a bunch of bullsh*t” and said, “I don’t think we need to make sure everybody gets a trophy, and make sure everybody is included.” Additionally, he recently told TMZ Sports that Group of Five teams should have to reach a certain ranking to qualify for the playoff, which is also a thinly veiled way of saying they shouldn’t be allowed in at all.

“The other thing is, I think the Group of 5, while it’s great to have them involved, I feel like they have to get to a certain ranking to be able to qualify to be able to get in,” Herbstreit said. “Nothing against those stories. We all love the Cinderella story, but I just think when you leave Texas, when you leave Notre Dame, when you leave Vandy, when you leave BYU out, the goal was to get the best teams, in my opinion, into the tournament, not try to make everyone happy.”

Herbstreit says, “We all love the Cinderella story,” but in the same breath, he argues for eliminating automatic bids for conference champions. You can’t love Cinderella stories and also want to make sure Cinderella never gets invited to the ball.

Klatt’s even more direct about it. He called March Madness “the dumbest tournament and the least fair tournament in all of sports,” specifically because it allows teams like Saint Peter’s to dance their way into the Elite Eight. His solution to Blue Bloods being upset in the first round is to hold group stages at higher-seeded arenas, which would make upsets nearly impossible. He looked at the most popular postseason tournament in American sports and decided the problem is that the wrong teams sometimes win.

“We go, and we put teams at odd times on neutral sites in a one-game affair. That doesn’t crown a true champion,” Klatt said. “We’re not doing anything that tells us who’s the best team over the course of the entire season.”

That might be true if sports were about crowning the “best” team through statistical optimization. But people don’t watch for that. They watch for UMBC beating Virginia, for Appalachian State beating Michigan, and for Boise State’s Statue of Liberty play against Oklahoma.

What makes the anti-Cinderella stance from the faces of college football media particularly galling is that they’ve spent years helping build the narrative that Group of Five teams can’t compete. Herbstreit was one of the loudest voices against UCF’s inclusion when they went undefeated in 2017 and 2018. He argued they hadn’t played good enough opponents to be considered, which is the classic Catch-22 for non-power conference teams. They get punished for their schedule, but they have no control over their schedule.

Then, when Cincinnati finally broke through and made the 2021 playoff as the first Group of Five team ever, Herbstreit mocked people for doubting it could happen.

“But I’m confused,” Herbstreit said sarcastically on the selection show. “What about that narrative that the Group of Five wasn’t allowed… should start their own… I thought there was a lot of buzz out there that the committee would never put a Group of Five [school] in. That’s weird. They must not have gotten that rule.”

It was smug and dismissive, particularly coming from someone who had spent years explaining why teams like Cincinnati routinely get screwed over. Cincinnati made the playoff because Oklahoma State missed a game-winning touchdown by two inches in the Big 12 title game, not because the system suddenly started respecting Group of Five teams.

The thing is that people like Herbstreit and Klatt have bought into the idea that winning doesn’t matter if you don’t play in the Big Ten or SEC. It’s a sports-wide narrative epidemic that’s infected college football coverage. If you’re not from a power conference, your accomplishments come with an asterisk, and any success you have is treated as a fluke rather than something earned.

Klatt has argued that JMU and Tulane are only in the playoff to avoid antitrust litigation. He’s repeatedly said it’s “a farce” to suggest these teams are on equal footing with Ohio State or Georgia in terms of resources and recruiting. Which is true. But that’s also kind of the point.

David-and-Goliath stories resonate because of the resource gap, not despite it. Nobody would care about JMU beating Ohio State if they had the same budget and recruiting classes. The whole point is watching a team find a way to win with less.

Klatt has suggested that Group of Five teams should have their own national championship, separate from the power conferences. “I think it would be better for the Group of Five, Six — whatever you want to call it — to go play their own national championship because guess what? The FCS national championship and playoffs is awesome,” he said.

That’s effectively advocating for a two-tier system in which JMU and Tulane aren’t allowed to compete for the same trophy as Alabama and Ohio State, even though they’re all technically playing at the same level of college football. It’s college football’s version of separate but equal, and it’s being pushed by people who claim to care about competitive balance.

The irony is that those in the same camp as Klatt and Herbstreit would absolutely love it if JMU or Tulane pulled off an upset this weekend. They’d call it the greatest moment in playoff history, talk about how nobody saw it coming, and celebrate the unpredictability of sports. But in the lead-up to the games, they’re spending their airtime arguing that these teams shouldn’t be there in the first place.

The most frustrating part is that fans actually do want Cinderella stories. They root for underdogs. They love seeing the little guy get a shot. So when college football’s most prominent voices insist they’re speaking for fans while arguing against teams like JMU and Tulane, it comes off as insulting. Fans aren’t demanding that the playoff be reserved for blue bloods. The people demanding that are the ones with the biggest platforms, the ones whose employers have financial incentives to maximize ratings, and the ones who’ve spent their careers covering the sport’s traditional powers.

This weekend, James Madison plays Oregon, and Tulane plays Ole Miss. Both are heavy underdogs. If they get blown out, the anti-Cinderella crowd will use it as proof that Group of Five teams don’t belong. If they keep it close or, god forbid, actually win, the same people will celebrate the upset while continuing to argue that these teams shouldn’t have been there.

The discourse has become exhausting. Either you believe in a system where teams earn their way in by winning, or you believe in a system where the committee picks who they think deserves to be there based on subjective criteria that always seem to favor the same handful of programs. College football has chosen the former, at least in theory, but the sport’s most prominent voices are lobbying hard for the latter.

If Klatt and Herbstreit got their way, college football would have no automatic bids for Group of Five conference champions. Teams like James Madison or Tulane would need to crack the top 12 in a ranking system designed to favor major conference teams. Good luck with that. You’d get the same 10-12 programs in the playoff every year, and eventually, people would stop caring.

And if that’s the sport they want, they should stop pretending they’re speaking for fans.