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- 🏅The College Football Playoff and the Problem with Conferences
🏅The College Football Playoff and the Problem with Conferences
The CFP alters incentives just enough to ask some tough questions
Hey there,
Today we’re zooming out, taking a look at the relationship between conferences, college football, and the finances of college sports. We’re not going to beat around the bush too much here — let’s just get into it!
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— Cole and Collin
Two things can be true at once.
On one hand, college football is one of God’s greatest gifts to humanity. The highs and lows, the unique regional identities, the over-the-top fanaticism – are rather unique to the sport in many respects. I imagine if you’re reading this newsletter at all, you don’t need me to parse out why college football is a one-of-a-kind product, and lay out why we love it so much.
But at the same time, we must be honest about how college football is broken – and there are indeed ways that it is broken. Specifically, here, I want to talk about how college football’s postseason has changed how we structure the sport at all. In other words, college football has never found an incredible way to crown its champion, and that’s jumbled so much of the sport as a result.
Nowadays, everyone has an idea for how to fix this problem. Usually these solutions involve changing various selection criteria for the CFP – and of course, this often boils down to how we evaluate one conference against another. That’s all fine and dandy – I think there’s plenty of validity to that line of reasoning. But what if we’re looking at this all wrong? What if being in the best conference hurts a team more than it helps them?
Today we’re talking about how conference affiliation can butt heads with the new College Football Playoff format – how financial incentives have changed, and subsequently, we’ve perhaps lost sight of what exactly college football programs exist to do in the first place.
