Why the College Football Playoff needs to expand for 2020 season

Why the College Football Playoff needs to expand for 2020 season

The College Football Playoff is completely up-in-the-air at the moment as we await the fate of the 2020 season.

While many around the country believe the College Football season will be postponed to later in the fall, others believe that the spring is the only feasible option currently. Still, many others say that the season will be canceled altogether before it’s all said and done.

No matter what the outcome, CFB Playoff Executive Director Bill Hancock has made it clear that the playoff will be ready if a College Football season is played.

While Hancock has also said the playoff isn’t looking to change anything currently, it only makes sense that we see an expanded playoff field for the 2020 season with the path that College Football is trending towards.

College Football needs an expanded playoff to crown a champion in 2020

The CFB Playoff currently fields four teams and they are selected by the committee, taking into account several different including conference championships, strength of schedule, quality of wins, and much more.

While that system has, for the most part, worked in years past, that’s not going to be the case this season and here’s why: The overarching belief is that we’re going to see a shortened season and very few- if any- non-conference games.

Therefore, a 9-1 team from the SEC will get a free pass to the playoff while a 9-1 team from the ACC or Pac-12 may be overlooked completely, even though we don’t know the true strength of any of the conferences heading into this season.

It only makes sense to expand to at least six teams (top two seeds receive byes) or to eight, just  for this season.

That would make these conference-only games matter and allow us to have automatic qualifiers by winning their conference. From there, the committee could determine its own seeding and everyone would be included and enter the year feeling like they have a shot.

This is going to be a weird year with a lot of changes along the way and one of those changes needs to be the expansion of the CFB Playoff, which can absolutely be done with a simple vote.