Sorry, Joel Klatt. We’re calling your Buff.
If CU followed Klatt’s advice on expanding the College Football Playoff, Bronco Mendenhall would be coaching his beloved Buffs right now.
Low risk. High floor. Safe. Boring, but safe.
You know what the Buffs did instead? The athletic department bet on itself.
AD Rick George bet on himself. CU, a football graveyard for most of its decade-plus in the Pac-12, pulled out all the stops to nab the most head-turning, camera-loving, scene-stealing name in college coaching.
CU outkicked its coverage with Deion Sanders. And kicked a dead program into three straight years of season-ticket sellouts and must-see TV.
So why should the Big 12 go the Bronco route? Why should it accept its status as a second-tier conference and concede more playoff spots, and playoff dollars, to the Big Ten and SEC?
CFP expansion is coming, as we all knew it would once TV got a taste. A 12-team championship bracket is now being pitched as a Sweet 16. It’s just a question of how many seats each conference gets at the table.
The Big 12 and ACC prefer what’s known as the “5+11” model, in which the five highest-ranked conference champions would receive automatic bids. The remaining 11 slots would be at-large and divvied up according to the CFP selection committee’s rankings.
According to reports, the Big Ten would prefer a “4+4+2+2+1” model, in which that league and the SEC would automatically get four bids each, guaranteeing that the two richest and most powerful conferences always take up half the 16-team field.
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Fair enough. Yet why not make them earn that power, instead of handing it over in return for scraps?
Look, if you’re Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark, every avenue stinks. Yet each of the 12 CFP teams in ’24-25 pocketed at least $4 million just for making the bracket, plus another $3 million to cover expenses incurred over each round. I’ll be darned if I’m going to concede that before the games are even played.
Want an equitable field?
Settle it on the field.
Give the Big Ten an inch, they’ll take 2,846 miles. Which is the distance between the University of Washington in Seattle and Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. — a 43-hour drive that now separates a pair of conference rivals.
Now that’s not to say Klatt, the former Buffs and Pomona High QB, doesn’t raise a point. At-large bids are subjective beasts. The Big 12 in 2024 wouldn’t have produced a top 16 team outside of league champ Arizona State last fall (although BYU was 17th in the final CFP rankings, while Iowa State and CU wound up 18th and 23rd, respectively).
It’s less than ideal to put the fate of multiple Big 12 berths in the hands of a committee that already looks upon the league the way the world used to look at the Big Ten West: Scrappy, bizarrely competitive and totally weird — just not nationally relevant.
That said, the problems for the Big 12, and CU, with the “4+4+2+2+1” model are threefold.
One is that it would officially codify the Big 12 — along with the ACC — to second-tier status. And if we’ve learned anything about business deals with the Big Ten and the SEC, it’s that they don’t concede and they never give anything back once it’s in their mitts. Enough — money, marquee schools, TV eyeballs — is never enough.
Two, good luck selling your “+2” to potential recruits. Especially when Big Ten and SEC peers are out on the trail waving a “+4” designation and “+4” cash in their families’ faces.
Third, it’s about access. Relevance. Opportunity. Remember TCU? Boise State? America loves an underdog story. TV viewers love an underdog story. Even if Big Ten presidents don’t.
Just because bean-counters always win in the end doesn’t mean you forfeit the fight.
Do you trust a committee to treat a 10-2 CU team better than, say, an 8-4 Georgia or Alabama bunch? That’s a risk. But in a world of bad options everywhere, it might be the only one worth taking.
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