Paved paradise: This past college football weekend is why we watch, a 24-team CFP makes it irrelevant

For college football fans, this past Saturday was amazing.

Skilled remote-control channel flippers were rewarded as college football Goliaths kept falling. When the smoke cleared, five of the top eight AP Poll teams went down, and the new No. 1 Miami was lucky to avoid the carnage.

This weekend was what college football fans cherish. It’s why fall weddings are detested. It’s why sickos have multiple screens at the ready every Saturday.

Hate-watching is the sport’s special sauce, giving us zestful bites of schadenfreude as we share in the delight of seeing bluebloods and top-ranked teams implode and, more importantly, face the repercussions.

I wrote about this phenomenon a few years back, and how the Big 12 struggles to attract viewers because it lacks programs that spark enough animosity to make you go out of your way to hate-watch their teams lose.

If you asked fans of some of the biggest college football fanbases (Texas, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Alabama, Michigan, Georgia, Florida State, etc.), “Which teams do you go out of your way to watch lose?” you’d probably get back a list that includes all of those aforementioned teams.

It’s not just the major fanbases that root against college football’s upper crust. We ALL do. That’s a major part of being a college football fan.

Pro sports don’t have “upset alert” notifications during regular season games. Most college football fans’ Saturdays consist of watching their team and watching one or two big games not involving their team. However, it also includes flipping around to see if any of the Goliaths of college football are flirting with an unexpected loss.

This is the shared experience of being a college football fan. 95 percent of the fans out there are definitely NOT rooting for your team. But when a powerhouse is in trouble, you all come together to feast on the sad fans and surrender cobras, debate the head coach’s buyout, and delight in watching their fans crash out on message boards and social media.

Our brains have long been trained like this. To make the BCS or the four-team playoff, your team needs other teams to lose to make room. A loss meant everything. One loss could take you out of the national championship picture. Losses had REAL consequences.

My wife once told me, “All you and your college friends do when you get together is complain about the one play or one call that prevented you from winning a championship in a lot of years.” She’s right.

Even when the CFP expanded to 12 teams, two losses have usually been enough to keep you out. Just ask Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, and BYU last year. Regular season games still have consequences.

This is why we watch every Saturday. It’s why we show up at the stadium. Because the games matter. Any given Saturday, there are real stakes.

Sadly, that’s all going away.

On Saturday, No. 1 Georgia, No. 2 Notre Dame, No. 5 Indiana, No. 6 Alabama, and No. 7 Texas all lost. Two of them lost to unranked teams. Texas and Alabama are officially on the CFP bubble, and things don’t get easier from here. The other three are still in the running, but one more loss could turn their season into a disaster.

Now, let’s run those five big losses through the lens of a 24-team playoff.

Georgia, Indiana, and Notre Dame are fine. One loss basically means nothing now. Texas or Alabama could lose two more times and miss the playoff, but even at 8-4, they still have a chance to play for a national title. Are you ready for a four-loss national champion?

Peril is what has made college football unique, and we are removing that from the equation.

These losses mean something this year. Despite Tony Petitti selling “tiered incentives” as a reason to care, losses won’t register next season, and won’t draw the attention, viewership, interest, joy, and sadness they do now. The 24-team CFP removes the sport’s special sauce and makes the regular season as forgettable as the NFL’s.

Tell me about an NFL regular-season game from 2023 not involving your team? NFL regular season games are largely gumballs in a gumball machine. Buy it for a quarter, chew on it for 15 minutes, and then spit it out.

Nobody wants this. Not even ESPN.

This, along with the Protect College Sports Act, isn’t the final move in solving the college football Rubik’s Cube. Every move the sport makes to “fix” things only creates more problems. “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell,” as the quote goes.

Meanwhile, the sport becomes less and less recognizable. These short-sighted decisions haven’t caught up with college football yet, but they will.

Bloated conferences with no history or regional identity. Games that have no consequences. We’re at the doorstep of powerhouse programs going football-independent and rivalry games where starters are rested because teams are thinking about the three or four playoff games ahead. You are deluding yourself if you think “tiered incentives” is enough to keep college football fans engaged from September to December.

I’ll miss fall Saturdays like this past one. God, they’ve been such a staple of my life. The world slows down, and unexpected consequences hunt down the college-football privileged. But no more. We are trading it in for playoff game blowouts featuring good-not-great teams closer to firing their coach than they are to winning a title.

Congrats, Tony Petitti, you’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

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