Generally, it’s bad if your sport encourages coaches to rest starters in times designed to be consequential.
Sports Illustrated’s Ross Dellenger published a column last night in which a College Football Playoff official said, “You’re just trying to minimize all the ways the NFL will fuck you.” The fucking in question? The piece is unclear, and it’s so laden with clunky ads that my computer’s about to crash as I try to read it, but it seems to be a lament (about the difficulty of squeezing eight more playoff games between NFL action) disguised as a grievance (regarding the NFL’s new Black Friday game). The logic seems to go that because college football was there first, with regard to Black Friday, the NFL shouldn’t encroach on its territory, but that even though the NFL was there first, with regard to Saturdays on the third weekend of December, the College Football Playoff should…sorry, no, there isn’t any logic. I don’t know anything about Dellenger, but this is a stupid column.
The column’s silliness aside, it raises an important issue: It’s going to be hard to fit two new playoff rounds in around the NFL schedule! A shocking twist. Some of this may be overblown—the core college football fan and the core NFL fan are often not the same person—but in terms of dominating the sports discourse in a given moment, it’s a fair concern. It’s also a concern that’s been an obvious issue ever since the concept of a single national championship game came to fruition. The NFL’s always been there, and with this lone Black Friday game (hardly believably a great one, but even bad ones do somehow have draw) the exception, the NFL’s schedule hasn’t changed much since the twelve-team playoff surged in prominence. The pioneers had a tough time crossing the Rocky Mountains, but I haven’t heard much about them blaming the mountains for “fucking” them by being where they, for all intents and purposes, have always been (I hope that quote was out of context—the column really is quite bad).
A large unanswered question is why the playoff’s first round needs to be on the third weekend of December, rather than the second (which seems to be one where the NFL doesn’t have games on Saturdays). “On-campus graduation ceremonies” are mentioned in the report, but it’s hard to believe those and final exams have that much power, especially over the specific teams playing in this specific playoff. It would make more sense if this were an issue for the FCS, where fewer players are making their livelihoods directly or indirectly through football, and it’s not an issue for the FCS. The FCS plays right through those weeks. So, there’s either something else going on (maybe the challenges of getting road fans to a faraway site with just one week’s notice, which is different from the regional Conference Championships and the longer-notice bowl games) or there’s some odd groupthink happening and someone will eventually say, “Hey, here’s an idea,” and the first round will get pushed up a week. Regardless, we’re starting to see the effects of playoff expansion, and the biggest one hasn’t even seemed to enter Sports Illustrated’s quicksand-laden digital playground:
The playoff puts a lot of emphasis on conference championships. It reserves the four byes for conference champions. It guarantees bids for the six highest-ranked conference champions. Winning your league’s conference championship is very good. But, in the context of the playoff, playing in your league’s conference championship game could be very bad, especially if you lose. An extra game against your league’s other best team? We don’t usually see teams drop far in the rankings from losses in those, but we do see players get beat up, and the loser will now have to turn around and play a week or two later, possibly on the road. Clearly, the conference championship isn’t a big carrot if Notre Dame, who has no intention of joining a conference, helped design this arrangement. The Irish are more than happy to take the 5-seed and host a mid-major in the first round on an extra week of rest in the event they’re a top-four team. If that’s the state of things, is it really going to matter to a comfortably-in-the-top-twelve Wisconsin entering the Big Ten Championship as a heavy underdog? Maximizing your eventual playoff longevity may, for some teams, mean resting starters in a conference championship game, and if stars sitting out bowl games irks many, imagine the reaction to their absence in Indianapolis or Atlanta.
The conference championship games are big moneymakers, which works both for and against them here. On the “for” side, they’ll likely continue to exist, because of revenue. On the other, their continued existence may create a less compelling product. Some of them will be playoff play-in games, effectively an extra round. Some of them will be seismic clashes between national powers, but potentially scaled-back clashes, as each keeps tricks up the sleeve rather than playing all-out, chasing existential stakes. Some will be routine, exercises in a lesser playoff team simply trying to play respectably enough to hold their incoming ranking while a greater playoff team merrily rolls along. In the present format, the Big Ten West champion is playing for a chance to be the ultimate spoiler, or occasionally for a backdoor playoff case of their own. In the future, they’ll have a lot more at stake when they get ready to go play Oregon or USC or whoever two weeks later, directing the incentive towards simple survival if they’re overmatched.
The best way for this to work, if it does end up being a problem (and maybe my worry is misplaced), would be for conference championship games to disappear again, and for leagues to name their champions based on the regular season standings. Unfortunately, this would bring us back to where we started, but with unique non-regional matchups in the playoff’s first round replacing emotional conference title clashes. So the actual best way for this to work? Hope like hell almost every conference title game still has a lot at stake. Enough to keep the starters on the field.
Trying
Same to-do’s as yesterday on my side:
- Re-launch Gelo for 2022-23 NHL season (and get up to speed on NHL season to-date)
- Get conference tiebreakers into college football model
- Get these notes caught up on the MLB offseason (which is happening) and the NHL/NFL/NBA seasons (which are also happening, allegedly)
- Catch up on college football futures
- Catch up on soccer futures
- Start NHL, NBA futures
- Build out college basketball models for 2022-23 (both men’s & women’s)
We’re planning on having more notes tomorrow. Maybe Sunday as well, we’ll see. My only baseball thoughts after last night’s game are mostly obvious. The Yankees need to win Game 3, and that’s a matter for tomorrow.
**
Viewing schedule, second screen in italics:
MLB
- 7:37 PM EDT: San Diego @ Philadelphia – Game 3 (FS1)
NBA
- 7:00 PM EDT: Chicago @ Washington
