Do you feel your spidey senses tingling? Do you just know in your bones that everything is about to go terribly wrong?
… Are you a top-four team in the 12-team College Football Playoff?
Presumably, being a top-four team is supposed to be a good thing. Earning a first-round bye is supposed to be a reward. Yes, there’s a long break between teams’ last games and the CFP quarterfinals, but most coaches would take that 10 out of 10 times to avoid the risk of losing and the risk of injury.
Still, there’s a development we can no longer ignore: Over two seasons of the 12-team Playoff, there have been eight teams that earned first-round byes … and seven of them promptly lost in the quarterfinal round. In the ongoing battle between rest and rust, rust seems to be winning in a landslide.
Thankfully, mighty Indiana (!) was strong enough to break the curse of the bye teams. The top-seeded Hoosiers wasted no time in laying to waste Alabama in this year’s Rose Bowl, beating the Tide, 38-3, after nearly a month between games.
This curse has even infected some of the game’s best coaches. Ryan Day and Kirby Smart — two of college football’s three active head coaches with a national title — both lost in the quarters this year as favorites.
But, in all seriousness, it’s hard to tell how big of a deal we should make of all this. Yes, teams that had a long layoff started off slow and/or lost games. But, last season, the top-four seeds had to be conference champions and weren’t actually the four highest-ranked teams; in all four matchups, the lower-seeded team was favored to win the quarterfinal game (and did).
So, is it just that the better team is winning these quarterfinal games regardless of seeding? Or is there something to the idea of a team gaining actual momentum by playing a first-round game? It’s unclear.
“The tough thing is if we use the layoff, then we’re going to use an excuse,” said Texas Tech coach Joey McGuire after the Red Raiders’ 23-0 loss to Oregon. “In this program, you don’t make excuses and you don’t let anybody make them for you. We’ve got to do better. If this is going to be what the College Football Playoff is, then we’ve got to find a way to be better to win that game.”
It’s possible that the powerbrokers who oversee the CFP make changes to the format and/or the schedule in response to this trend. They do have a few options, with or without actually expanding the field. If they stay with a 12-team bracket, they could start the whole Playoff a week earlier — the second weekend of December, the one typically reserved for the annual Army-Navy game — which would allow the CFP to get all four first-round games in without directly competing against the NFL, too. (The NFL cannot begin playing games on Saturdays until the third Saturday of December.) And if every round gets moved up, the top-four seeds would not have to wait more than three whole weeks to play again.
Moving up the start of the CFP by one week is “not off the table,” executive director Rich Clark told NBC Sports last month. Clark said that the commissioners and presidents who oversee the CFP prefer to keep the current two-week break between conference championship games and the first round for players’ health and safety reasons, but that leaders “will look at it and evaluate it as they do every year.” The 10 Football Bowl Subdivision commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua will meet in Miami ahead of the national championship game later this month.
If those commissioners and presidents decide to expand the bracket to include 16 teams, the rust-versus-rest debate would likely come up there, too. The CFP would need to encroach on that second weekend of December for additional games at that point, and perhaps administrators would look at having the top seeds playing (and hosting) first-round games instead of using byes as part of the format.
There’s another option, too. If the CFP really wanted to make sure its top seeds had every advantage, they could let them host quarterfinal games. First-round on-campus games have been great for the sport, and there’s already been a push from fans, coaches and athletic directors to put at least one more round on college campuses, too. There are logistical challenges due to winter commencement ceremonies and the holidays, of course, but it’s worth exploring. And it would help the higher-seeded teams, regardless of the length of the layoff between games.
We’ll see if this becomes an issue the CFP decides to take on. It’s a small sample size, yes. But it’s becoming a major talking point in a sport that loves to overreact and complain.
And we’ll be hearing a lot about it.
