Expanding the College Football Playoff seems inevitable at some point down the road. But how the sport decides to expand it is what some bowl executives are trying to address.
It’s believed that under a new format, the first round of the College Football Playoff could be played at the home venues of higher seeds. This is something that the heads of bowl games understandably want to avoid.
In a letter to leaders within the college football sphere, Bowl Season executive director Nick Carparelli and chairman Mark Neville called on the College Football Playoff selection committee to ensure that the tournament be played through bowl games. Their assertion is that bowl games offer a “neutral, competitively fair setting” and believe that changing the format would be “harmful to Bowl Season.”
“We believe any plan for an expanded playoff should include all playoff games being played within the traditional Bowl structure, not the home site of one of the participating teams,” the letter stated, via ESPN. “The Bowls would provide a neutral, competitively fair setting for these games as they have throughout their history. To exclude Bowl games from any round of an expanded playoff would be harmful to Bowl Season, individual Bowls and their host communities, and post-season college football in general.”
Bowl group carps on campus sites for bigger CFP https://t.co/tYI0qeMih7
— Heather Dinich (@CFBHeather) October 28, 2021
The most recent report from ESPN indicates that the College Football Playoff could be expanded to 12 teams. Under this new format, the six highest ranking conference champions would face the next six at-large teams.
The four highest-ranking teams would get byes while the lower eight would play each other in home games.
A vote could be happening soon, but implementation is far from imminent.
In the letter, Carparelli calls on the committee to at least bring the Bowl Season representatives to the table for the talks.
“We know that the commissioners are going to make these final decisions, and we would never intrude on that,” Carparelli said. “However, we look at postseason college football as having two components: the playoff component and bowl season. And they’re both equally important, and they really work together a lot of ways. So we think we can add a lot of value to the conversation and maybe come up with solutions that the commissioners would not have contemplated or maybe would have never thought that the bowl system could handle.”
We’ll see if the College Football Playoff selection committee takes their suggestion or not.
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