Turns out, the College Football Playoff really is ruining college football

Doomsayers thought the College Football Playoff would ruin the sport by devaluing the regular season.

In the sport we knew, one loss was often one loss too many to be part of the national championship conversation. With four teams making the bracket, multiple one-loss teams would still be in contention, and when the field expanded to twelve, there were multiple spots for *gasp* two-loss teams! In fact, through the first two years of a twelve-team tournament, both finals have included a two-loss team. 

Those doomsayers weren’t wrong to be concerned. They just missed on the reason.

If the College Football Playoff ruins college football, it will be because the teams that missed the playoff each year were loud enough to convince us all that the regular season matters too much to take any real risks.

First, Steve Sarkisian sparked rumors that Texas would abandon future games against Ohio State and Michigan. Now, Ohio State could lose another opponent as Paul Finebaum reports that Alabama may back out of its home-and-home series with the Buckeyes.

Fans should be furious. Backing out of games that may be too hard is embarrassing. Not only does it fly in the face of what the program aims to be, but it’s insulting to fans.

And therein lies the problem. Too many fans are willing to eat the turds that the biggest programs are trying to shovel into their mouths. Why?

Ring culture 

It’s a concept most associated with the NBA, but ring culture has completely overtaken sports. Just look at the conversations around Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson every postseason. “Rings or it didn’t happen” might as well be the new rallying cry of sports fans online. 

You can’t really blame college football fans for falling into this trap. Look at how the College Football Playoff has come to dominate conversations about the sport.

ESPN has Heather Dinich giving insight on the committee and Paul Finebaum questioning its motivations, literally the second a ball is kicked. Each Saturday, College GameDay spends half of the three hours it’s on bitching about Group of Five teams getting a spot in the playoff. Flip the channel to Fox, and you’ll see Big Noon Kickoff bitching that the field is not made up of twelve Big Ten teams.

Getting to the College Football Playoff is so important to the way teams are perceived now that it has created this sport’s version of tanking. There’s no incentive to lose, but there’s also no incentive to give fans in the stands something interesting to watch. It’s easy to duck any challenge from outside of your regular conference slate when you have members of the college football media eager to carry your water and frame the move as 4D chess rather than directly pissing on paying customers.

TV will always win

No sport has prioritized TV money over the fan experience more than football. That’s true in both college and the NFL. Fans don’t like it, but so many are convinced there is nothing they can do about it.

The pros have taken games and left the country entirely. For college football, teams are willing to eliminate any chance to see something unique in the regular season. Networks are happy to comply because it doesn’t hurt them. If an NFL Sunday has to begin at 8 am Eastern time to accommodate a kickoff in Munich, so be it. ESPN will just make it a streaming exclusive. If Alabama and Ohio State cancel their planned home-and-home, so be it. There will just be more anticipation for seeing those teams meet in the playoff.

College football fans lose more than NFL fans do in this arrangement. NFL football is NFL football. In college, though, being on campus is part of the experience. It seemed like every blueblood program had woken up to that reality and virtually killed off the 2010s trend of moving your biggest non-conference games to Atlanta or Dallas.

That was good news when it meant that big non-conference games would be played on campus. Now, it could mean those games just won’t be played at all.

Long-term implications

If backing out of top-tier non-conference matchups becomes a reality and then turns into a trend, we are on a road backwards. College football really does attract national attention and drive national conversations now. What happens if truly interesting games only happen within their conference bubbles?

Three of the four power conferences said they would require members to schedule at least one non-conference game against a team from another power conference. It was a marketing message. The sport may be moving into its own spheres of influence, but it would still be The MCU, where there is plenty of crossover, and everything connects. But that requirement rings hollow if it can’t guarantee Alabama vs. Ohio State actually happens and only results in Purdue vs. North Carolina-type games.

What incentive would there be for fans to ever pay attention to anything outside of their conference? Hell, ESPN and Fox are already moving us down that path with their competing conference affiliations and narratives. If those games go away, I truly worry for the sport’s long-term health. It will turn back into a regional sport pretty quickly.