SMU Joins Indiana in Proving 12 Is Simply Too Many Playoff Teams
Just enjoy the games! We need more football! When you can fundamentally change an entire sport to revolve around a Playoff system that produces dogshit games, you gotta do it!
What we've seen through the first two games of the College Football Playoff is not Indiana's or SMU's fault. We knew what those teams were before we sent them on the road to get pasted by actual Playoff-caliber squads. These blowouts are the fault of every decision maker in college football who wanted to make everything about the Playoff — at the expense of many things that made the sport great for a century — and expand it to include teams that have no business being there. There weren't 12 Playoff-worthy teams this season and there won't be in any of the next 10 seasons, either. It's just too many.
The arguments about SMU getting in over Alabama and Ole Miss are stupid. Those teams each lost three games with multiple coming to bad opponents. They didn't deserve to be in the Playoff. And while I guess you could argue SMU's résumé — which still wasn't very good — was deserving of being included this year, the team clearly wasn't.
But there's no solution to the actual problem. The 12-team field is going to include bad teams every single season, especially as long as the committee continues to reward teams that beat up on bad conferences. The same people complaining about these games being blowouts would lose their minds if we actually put the 12 best teams in the country in the Playoff.
And again, I don't want that, either, because that would have included multiple three-loss SEC teams this year. To get to 12 teams, you're always going to have to decide between those who don't deserve to be in the Playoff and those who will almost certainly get killed once they get there.
Luckily, this is what everyone wanted. More football!