Are Eight Teams Enough for a Football Playoff?

Never be satisfied; that’s the motto of the postseason chatter on college football that will soon die down once the upcoming season begins. As soon as we learned the BCS committee was going to dissolve and the game would finally have a four-team playoff, there was already talk of when it would expand.

Many expect it to jump up to eight teams eventually. I took the stance of bringing the field all the way to 16 teams. Not as many people agreed with it.

According to our own poll at Autzen Zoo, 230 of the 367 people that voted that they wanted eight teams in a college football playoff. 72 took my stance with 16 teams, 49 were happy with the new four-team format, and 16 people don’t like change.

While I believe that an eight-team playoff would be better for the sport, there’s nothing that shows me that a 16-team playoff cannot be done. In fact, I’m surprised a four-team playoff was passed.

What do the major six conferences think? Every season, two, three, maybe even four of these conferences will be left out. The SEC has created a monster that can apparently justify two teams from their own conference to be selected as the two best teams in the nation and compete in a national title game.

It nearly renders the entire rest of the country useless in the big picture of things.

Now, I understand that some people don’t care about that big picture. Plenty of people I know at Iowa State just care about tailgating six days a year, drinking with old friends, and hoping the team makes a bowl at the end of the season.

But with the Ducks, they’ve tasted a national championship. They’ve been to three straight BCS events. Anything but an entry into the final four would be considered a failure. Still, with the natural landscape that’s developed in the sport, the team is still just generating the cliche of “a team in the west coast to watch out for.”

Having eight teams could eliminate the problem for the Ducks, but what about the other conferences after that? Conference USA/Mountain West (or whatever hybrid name that it will become), the MAC, the Sun Belt, and even the independents will want to find a way to be assured of one of these playoff spots.

But with eight teams, all you’re going to get is two SEC teams for sure, probably two Big 12 teams, a Pac-12 team, an ACC team, and Big Ten team, maybe a Big East team, maybe Notre Dame or BYU…

The point is, these smaller teams will never be in the mix unless all the conferences have automatic qualifiers along with filling the rest of the field with at-large bids. And a 16-team playoff would give us that.

Full equality in the entire college football landscape, more reasons to watch at the end of the season, and finally hope that every single team in Division I FBS does have a chance to taste a national championship at the end of the season.

Anyone that believes a larger playoff would water down the regular season or don’t believe there would be enough of a timeframe to create a playoff are foolish. There’s only 32 teams in the NFL but they allow 12 teams into a playoff. Plenty of teams are still fighting for a playoff spot in the final weeks of the season. That’s a far cry when nearly every college football game becomes worthless in the last month of the season when we have the field narrowed to no more than eight teams having a shot to get into a title game right now.

What’s being watered down are the numerous bowls that are attracting less fans in this economy. There is no such thing as tradition in bowls with the exception of the fans that carry that tradition toward their team. And they can carry that same tradition into a potential playoff game or a far less selection of bowl games.

Regardless of which playoff format you believe in, it is better to give these teams a goal than just hitting at least an average 6-6 record to get to a bowl game. Satisfy both kinds of fans; the ones that just want to drink a beer with their friends outside of the stadium, and the others that want to cheer their team to a national championship.

Brian Spaen is the lead editor for Autzen Zoo, follow the site on Facebook and Twitter. Read his other work on the Iowa State blog, Clones Confidential, and Watson Talk Lacrosse.