Paul Sullivan: The solution to college football's COVID-19-plagued season is clear: Expand the playoff to a 16-team 'Winter Madness.'
You can’t go to the fridge these days without missing the latest news of a COVID-19 postponement or cancellation in college football.
Saturday’s Ohio State-Maryland game was canceled Wednesday after eight Maryland players tested positive for the coronavirus, while the SEC postponed the Georgia-Missouri game after previously postponing Auburn-Mississippi State, Alabama-LSU and Texas A&M-Tennessee for reasons related to the spread of the virus. Last weekend’s Pac-12 openers had two cancellations, and Wisconsin has played only one game with two cancellations.
Everyone knew this would be a difficult season to get through, which is why the Big Ten and Pac-12 were among the conferences that originally postponed the season until sometime in 2021, only to jump back in after the SEC, Big 12 and ACC ignored the risks and started anyway.
The recent rise in COVID-19 cases across the country has only added to the mess and threatens to postpone or cancel even more games over the next six weeks. Some conferences have shifted postponed games until later in the season, while the Big Ten decided from the get-go to simply cancel games that couldn’t be played, leaving schools with uneven schedules.
Trying to determine whether second-ranked Notre Dame is more playoff-worthy at 7-0 than 13th-ranked Wisconsin at 1-0 is mere guesswork, making the race for the four playoff spots more subjective than ever.
The solution, of course, is to expand the College Football Playoff from four to 16 teams in 2020.
Baseball expanded its postseason from 10 to 16 teams this year, and the NFL has approved a contingency plan to expand its postseason from 14 to 16 teams if the it can’t complete a full regular season in 17 or 18 weeks. Both decisions were made after the season had begun, so it shouldn’t be impossible for college football to make changes on the fly.
Here are four steps to make it happen.
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1. Eliminate conference title games.
That would mean no conference champion is crowned in the three Power Five conferences with two divisions this year — the Big Ten, Pac-12 and SEC. It also would ruin the possibility of a Notre Dame-Clemson rematch in the ACC title game and a likely Alabama-Florida showdown for the SEC championship.
Instead, the top two teams, by committee ranking, in each of the Power Five conferences would be invited to the postseason, taking 10 of the 16 spots. The conference title games are fun but unnecessary. Notre Dame and Clemson could still meet in the playoffs, which would be even better. The absence of conference title games for one season would be a small price to pay for expanded playoffs.
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2. Get rid of the lesser bowl games.
A record 43 bowl games were scheduled before the pandemic, and six already have bowed out: the Redbox, Bahamas, Hawaii, Holiday, Quick Lane and Las Vegas bowls. A new bowl in Boston called the Fenway Bowl also is out, having been replaced by the Montgomery Bowl in Alabama.
The NCAA waived the requirement that, to be bowl-eligible, teams had to have at least six wins (or five if there are unfilled bowl slots) because of the reduced schedules and disparate number of games being played in various conferences. The Big Ten is playing a maximum of nine games, for instance, while the ACC gets 11 and the Pac-12 seven.
Teams that don’t make the playoffs are done, reducing the risk of contracting COVID-19 in a meaningless bowl game. No one needs to see a sub-. 500 team in a game that hardly anyone can attend, so lopping the rest of the schedule should be a no-brainer. Sorry, Frisco, Myrtle Beach and Famous Idaho Potato bowls. Better luck next year.
The lesser bowls would be sorely missed by gamblers, ESPN executives and the local chambers of commerce. Everyone else would get by.
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3. Invite six at-large teams.
Instead of arguing whether an unbeaten American Athletic Conference team such as Cincinnati is getting hosed by the 13-member committee in favor of a one-loss Power Five team such as Florida, the Bearcats would be virtually assured of making the Sweet 16 field. There also might be a spot for BYU, Coastal Carolina, Marshall or, dare we say, Liberty.
Naturally, there still would be debates over teams that miss out. Griping over the bracket is a tradition no pandemic can make disappear. But at least the 16-team field would contain one or two teams that would never have a shot at making a four-team playoff, making it more akin to March Madness. A first-round game pitting Alabama versus Coastal Carolina could be a football version of Duke-Yale in the NCAA Tournament.
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4. Make ‘Winter Madness’ must-see TV.
The Sweet 16 games would be played over two days, consisting of the Outback, Sun, Liberty, Citrus, Gator, Texas, Independence and Birmingham bowls. The quarterfinals would be on one glorious day, starting at 11 a.m. Eastern with the Orange Bowl and continuing with the Peach (1:30 p.m.), Cotton (5 p.m.) and Fiesta (8:30 p.m.).
After a week off, the Rose and Sugar bowls would remain the sites of the two semifinal games, and the championship still would be played at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla.
That’s 15 games that matter, instead of three that matter and 40 other bowl games providing filler.
And if America doesn’t like it, college football always could return to the norm in 2021.
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