As support grew for the College Football Playoff to expand from 12 to 24 teams, money was not the primary factor.

Yes, the new five-year, $1.7 billion deal finalized Monday will add a few million for each school in the SEC and Big Ten and a smaller amount for everyone else. But replacing conference championship games with a bunch of first-round playoff games was not, on its own, a big enough pot of gold to blow up the entire sport and risk losing the sanctity of the regular season.

What was worth it? Access. As coaches and administrators experienced the 12-team playoff, they came to the conclusion — and probably correctly — that nothing resonates with fans anymore besides getting into the field. They increasingly saw their own job security tied to the black-and-white standard of being in or out, so they simply changed the standard to include far more programs stuck in the middle of the two richest conferences.

But will more playoff access really calm down the “Fire Everyone” culture that seems to be increasingly pervasive in college football? Here’s a prediction: It’ll make it far, far worse.

Though it was a slow start to this year’s coaching carousel, business is picking up with four power conference openings and several more that could materialize in the coming weeks. The real surprise, though, is how many first-year coaches are already under pressure.

Michigan’s Kyle Whittingham, California’s Tosh Lupoi, Washington State’s Kirby Moore, Colorado State’s Jim Mora and Tulane’s Will Hall have been so disappointing in Year 1 that it wouldn’t be a shock if their schools pulled the plug and started over. Even at places like Arkansas and Florida, where the record is no different from what was expected, first-year coaches are struggling to convince fans they are on the right track.

Traditionally, firing a coach after one year was taboo unless there was an off-field scandal. Even if it was immediately clear to university administrators that they hired a coach who was in over his head, it was almost too embarrassing to admit such a mistake without at least two years of on-field evidence.

But if that culture is indeed changing and compressing the timeline for coaches to prove themselves, the 24-team playoff is going to be like dumping kerosene on a bonfire.

If you thought the 12-team playoff created a world of FOMO for everyone who didn’t get in, just wait until two-thirds of the power conference schools realize every November that they landed on the wrong side of a pass-fail test.

When the standard is really, really high to make the playoff, you can at least rationalize not making it. Even now, in the 12-team version, we have seen good teams like Texas, Notre Dame and Vanderbilt last year all fall short because there wasn’t enough room and the margin for error was small. If you fell short of the cut line, you were in good company.

So when you change the threshold so dramatically, you are of course including more teams worthy of a shot. But you are also creating a new standard for what constitutes a successful season. It’s inevitable that, starting next year, fans and boosters will consume college football in a much more binary fashion: You’re either in or you’re out, and it’s a big problem if you’re out.

At the same time, college football is undergoing an Overton window revolution on what kind of season is acceptable for a new coach. It used to be, the first year was a free pass. Especially at programs that had lost for a few years, the results didn’t matter. All you had to do was show that you’ve changed the locker room culture, be a little bit more competitive than the last coach, and secure a good recruiting class to keep fans happy.

Those days are gone. Even if Curt Cignetti getting Indiana to the playoff in Year 1 and winning a national title in Year 2 is the extreme example, he’s far from alone in using the transfer portal to engineer an immediate turnaround. When fans see Bob Chesney get UCLA to 9-0, Will Stein put Kentucky into the CFP mix, Eric Morris win quickly at Oklahoma State with players he coached at North Texas and James Franklin put the best Virginia Tech team on the field in nearly a decade, everyone has a right to ask, “Why not us?”

If you’re trying to figure out what’s fueling so much anger right now at a place like Florida, which is 5-4 and has not been bad overall in Jon Sumrall’s first year, look no further. Under a traditional timeline, Florida fans would generally be in agreement that Sumrall needed time to rebuild the program after five straight mediocre (or worse) seasons and wouldn’t start rendering any judgments until Year 3.

But now that it’s proven you can flip any program in a year, that becomes the expectation. Nobody can afford to play the long game anymore. At 5-4 with wins over Texas and Ole Miss, Sumrall is not on the hot seat and has largely been fine. But will the chatter about his job security move from the online world to the real world if he’s not on track to make the 24-team playoff at this time next year?

You can set your watch by it.

The collision of those two factors — expanding the playoff and the recent track record of coaches winning in Year 1 — will inevitably accelerate all the conversations fans are having when they start to wonder if they’ve got the right guy. And as we see around the country every year, prohibitive finances are no match for administrative self-preservation.

For weeks, Florida State officials were adamant that they wanted to bring back Mike Norvell, largely because his approximate $50 million buyout was such an issue. When the noise got loud enough, though, the school president caved. We could see the same thing starting to unfold at Nebraska, where Matt Rhule signed a new contract last year with a $63 million buyout but now finds himself at the center of a fan mutiny after losing four straight.

These are not healthy developments, but Newton’s Third Law of Motion always wins in the end. For every action (massive coaching contracts, playoff expansion, transfer portal free-for-all), there will be an equal and opposite reaction (new expectations, more pressure, less patience to build from the ground up). The old rules no longer apply.

But there is a real problem with what they’ve done here. At 24 teams, there are still going to be more losers than winners at the end of every college football season; only now, it will make the line between the two that much brighter. Everyone will feel that much more pressure to be on the right side of the divide because it will be viewed as unacceptable to fall short.

There are plenty of reasons why expanding the playoff makes sense. Increased parity means more than 12 teams deserve a chance, donors are being asked to pour $40-50 million into rosters without enough postseason rewards and there was no way to rescue the bowl system given all the focus on the CFP. The conference championship games had also gotten stale since realignment helped form 16- and 18-team mega-conferences, so there is some logic in replacing them with first-round playoff games.

But if coaches and administrators think that a team squeaking into the playoff as the No. 22 seed will spare them from the “Fire Everyone” culture they seek to tame, it will prove to be a delusion. And if God forbid they miss the 24-team playoff, they will soon get a lesson in unintended consequences.

Source: Yahoo Sports