The college football playoff is expected to expand, and everyone (everyone) is asking:
What does this mean for college football’s NIT?
This is a great question. An excellent question, even. We’re going to answer it, but first:
We need to establish what college football’s NIT is.
I’ve done this elsewhere, but I don’t know if I’ve ever specifically given a blurb to the topic, and it feels like it’d be useful to have one, so here goes:
There are three bowls with a claim to being college football’s NIT. The first is the Gator Bowl. The second is the Sun Bowl. The third is the Citrus Bowl. All three are old (birth years 1945, 1935, and 1946, respectively), just as the NIT is. All three feature teams between the 70th and 90th percentile of the sport in quality (the Sun Bowl, generally, is poorer than the Gator Bowl, which is in turn generally poorer than the Citrus Bowl), just as the NIT does. All three take place in funny locales (Jacksonville, El Paso, Orlando) and all are funny for different reasons (respectively: its existence, its complete opposite-ness to Orlando, its primary industry), which isn’t the same as the NIT, but is funny, like the NIT is funny. And speaking of humor, each has an undignified sponsor (right now they’re TaxSlayer, Tony the Tiger, and Vrbo), which again, isn’t exactly NIT-like, but is funny, like the NIT is funny.
Which holds the best claim to the crown? It’s a great debate. So great that it’s hard to do succinctly. Which means we won’t have it here. The bottom line is this: These are the contenders. These are, for our purposes, college football’s NIT.
Now, to what a 12-team playoff means for these bowls:
This is AWESOME.
There’s going to be an argument to be made that college football should go back to just doing bowls and not having a playoff. The playoff’s going to be ugly at times. The playoff’s going to last forever. A few hilarious teams are going to make the playoff (think: Arizona, South Carolina, Michigan). Someone’s going to make the argument that the playoff must be destroyed. If no one else does it, I will. And guess which part of college football’s postseason isn’t the playoff? That’s right. The remaining bowls. And which of those are the best? College football’s NIT. (The Outback Bowl, which is just too young to be included with those others but I guess could be called college football’s Australian NIT, is up there too, and there are probably a couple others, but look: We’re parsing bowls here. We’re in the power position.)
So, to answer the initial question: Playoff expansion to twelve teams is great for college football’s NIT. More than that, yeah, we’re getting dicey. But putting the NIT bowls at the forefront of all remaining actual bowls (and not playoff games disguised as bowls) is big. This is big for us.
