There’s a trend this year, in certain segments of college football fandom and media, to talk about how awesome the twelve-team playoff is going to be. Breathlessly, we are told how next year this is all going to be a whole lot better. Next year, evidently, we’re finally going to enjoy college football.
It’s this last implication that’s the most bothersome, this implication that we aren’t enjoying college football already. This weekend, LSU will play Arkansas as part one of a series in which the Tigers try to hold off Alabama. Alabama will play Mississippi, trying to let out some frustration and keep a narrow playoff angle alive. UCF will play Tulane, the winner that much closer to being Cotton Bowl-bound, that much higher-ranked, that much nearer a chance to play one of the sport’s marquee teams. Washington will go down to Eugene, home to one of its two biggest rivals, looking to enliven its own conference championship hopes while extinguishing the playoff hopes of hated Oregon. North Carolina will play at Wake Forest, looking to fire open a quizzical playoff path of its own. TCU will play at state king Texas, trying to improbably stay undefeated and guarantee itself a Big 12 title game appearance. Kansas State will visit Baylor in Waco with a Big 12 Championship berth for each also potentially on the line. Florida State will go to Syracuse, believing its back to national relevance and looking to make the case to the rest of the room. Clemson will try to bounce back against Louisville, cast Saturday as a fluke, and become a playoff candidate once more. Georgia, Ohio State, Michigan, Tennessee, UCLA, and Utah will each encounter an inferior conference foe, and each will be aiming for style points. It is a great college football weekend. An incredible college football weekend. But, the twelve-team-playoff hype squad tells us, it could be so much better.
Could it be? Yes and no. On the one hand, yes, it could be better. More playoff teams adds more playoff stakes to more games. That’s a rather simple truth. “So much,” though? No. Penn State’s game against Maryland would be more interesting. NC State’s game against Boston College might hold a tiny degree of national interest. But the college football weekend would be almost identical to what it already is, and it’s not like things are supposed to get more boring next week, with four possible playoff teams set to play one another in the Pac-12 alone.
Expanding to a twelve-team playoff this year, ironically (ironically because I’m not sure this would always be the case, so to some extent these twelve-teamers might be picking a bad year to make their argument), wouldn’t make many games all that much more interesting, and for those it would, the interest increase would be marginal. Tulane or UCF, in twelve-team world, would not be poised to be anything better than the 11th or 12th seed, meaning they’d be playing for the right to be likely annihilated by Tennessee or Michigan in the first round. This isn’t leaps and bounds better than playing for the right to play Penn State in Jerry World on network television. NC State? Part of an argument I was told yesterday concerning the Wolfpack was that their Black Friday game against UNC could be gigantic were there a playoff spot on the line. Would it be gigantic? No. The teams would be playing for a fringy shot at the 11-seed (and the accompanying pulverization by Tennessee or Michigan), a shot reliant on at least Penn State losing in surprising fashion (because, of the not-conference champions, we’d already have Alabama, Tennessee, Michigan, the Pac-12 runner up, and probably the Big 12 runner up locked into the twelve-team field, if not LSU and/or Mississippi). And besides, that game is…already huge? It’s NC State playing its biggest rival, and if they do both reach that weekend without losing (which is a necessary part of the scenario I was told would change the world), there will be playoff stakes on the line. UNC will be a fringe playoff possibility already (a 12-1 ACC Champion who only lost to Notre Dame has a chance whether it wears orange or it wears sky blue). If that doesn’t get fans going, does the possibility of being a twenty-point underdog against Jim Harbaugh on the night of the office Christmas party?
The twelve-team playoff will be fine. It will probably be good, even, because college football is good, because we love college football. But it isn’t going to change the sport in some landmark way. (At least, not at first: It’s possible the unintended consequences regarding scheduling and the importance of conference championships could change it for the worse, but we’ll leave that revisitation for another time.) Everything will be mostly the same, but we’ll have a playoff carrot rather than a New Year’s Six bowl carrot. That’s a better carrot, yes. But it is still merely a carrot. It is not a bar of gold. Especially not with the playoff’s first rounds set to happen in December, sandwiched in between holiday movies and NFL games, with few casual fans tuning in with earnestness until…New Year’s, like they do already. This is the secret of the whole thing: Yes, expanding the playoff adds interest. Yes, expanding the playoff will increase revenue. But NC State wouldn’t suddenly be playing for a national championship. That’d still be reserved for the teams already doing it.
Louisville: Yikes!
It’s good that Scott Satterfield isn’t interviewing with Auburn, because Louisville needs some good vibes, and they sure aren’t coming from the men’s basketball program. After losing an exhibition a week or so ago to Lenoir-Rhyne (not a sneaky-respectable opponent), Louisville lost to Bellarmine last night at home. Bellarmine, only a couple years into its Division-I life. Bellarmine, projected to finish second in the ASUN if it has a good year. Bellarmine, who plays in Louisville’s hand-me-down arena, Freedom Hall (I didn’t put this together until last night either).
Louisville might still be fine. In the long term, specifically, with a rabid fanbase and therefore plenty of recruiting opportunity in the era of the transfer portal and NIL, but in the short term too. It’s just one game, the team is bad but its league isn’t great, it’s Year One for Kenny Payne and the bar constituting success is low.
Other college basketball reactions? I don’t have many yet. Providence sure looked bad against Rider. Georgetown sure has fallen on hard times (and unlike Louisville, their path out of turmoil is far from clear, because my impression is Georgetown doesn’t have an entire culture at its back desperate to get the program back on pace with an existential rival). I’m excited for Thanksgiving Week, when the schedule will really blow open and we’ll start getting to know teams. It’s funny how much the desire to make it easy on players to vote, in a roundabout way, completely changed college basketball’s first month. It explains why the resistance was there in the first place. If you don’t open with the Champions Classic on Election Night, this is evidently what happens. There is too much football for networks to care for a Gonzaga/Tennessee game this early.
Checking In on Willson Contreras
We are deeply committed to the take that the Cubs are going to keep Willson Contreras, and we do think the likelihood is magnitudes higher than pundits are saying, for all the reasons we’ve said before. (Short version: They need a second catcher, he is cheaper for them than he is for anyone else because of the Qualifying Offer, he likes Chicago so he may be even cheaper thanks to that.) But. One thing I didn’t really consider was that Willson Contreras’s free agency isn’t taking place in a vacuum. I’m not horribly concerned that he’ll sign early, but I’m concerned the Cubs might hear his asking price and not want to wait for it to come down, and that they’ll sign Roberto Perez to a one-year deal in the next few weeks before he can get away, so that they can then turn their big-money attention elsewhere. This is the scenario I didn’t consider. But I’ll still be very surprised if Contreras signs before the Cubs sign Yan Gomes a platoon-mate. More on baseball soon, hopefully. Need to catch up on some things.
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Viewing schedule, second screen rotation in italics:
College Basketball (the best we have, covering all the time slots)
- 6:00 PM EST: Lehigh @ Virginia Tech (ACCN)
- 7:00 PM EST: Towson @ UMass (ESPN+)
- 8:00 PM EST: Southern Illinois @ Oklahoma State (ESPN+)
- 10:00 PM EST: Vermont @ Saint Mary’s (WCC Network)
- 11:00 PM EST: Alabama State @ USC (P12N)
NFL
- 8:15 PM EST: Atlanta @ Carolina (Prime Video)
