How 50-Year-Old Criticisms of College Football’s Playoff Hold Up Today

Fifty-seven years ago, the NCAA gave preliminary approval to an idea that, at the time, would have been a massive shift in the sport: an eight-team playoff, featuring six conference champions and two at-large selections. The proposal was put forth by Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty, who’d seen his team share the 1965 title with Alabama after the Coaches Poll crowned the Spartans before bowl season while the AP waited until after Michigan State’s Rose Bowl loss to UCLA to give their title to the Crimson Tide.

In moving the proposal forward to the appropriate committees and such, NCAA executive secretary Walter Byers noted, “I don’t see any reason why college football cannot follow the same national collegiate playoff pattern as all other intercollegiate sports enjoy today.”

But, as you already know, it would be decades until college football would even arrange for No. 1 and No. 2 to play in a bowl game, and even longer before a playoff with more than two teams would be put into place. By the 1968 offseason, Daugherty’s proposal — which wasn’t the first time someone in the sport had argued for a playoff — was dead. The reasons varied: the SEC wasn’t willing to sacrifice its relationship with the bowls, and Notre Dame had a school policy against participating in any kind of postseason. Purdue head coach Jack Mollenkopf, however, listed six reasons why a playoff wouldn’t work for college football, and I want to hold them up to today’s game to see how those concerns have faded or persisted, in order of least to most troublesome in 2023.

1. “Teams in the North would have difficulty practicing for a period of two or three weeks.” No longer an issue thanks to indoor practice facilities. 

2. “Faculties would not permit such a game.” This one’s definitely a relic of its time when things like “should the Buckeyes accept a Rose Bowl bid” were subject to a faculty council vote and could, as happened in 1961 when the Ohio State faculty council voted no and students rioted in response.

3. “[The playoff] would interfere with the academic program of the universities, especially for the athletes.” No longer a problem, though the reason why can depend on whether you’d like to be an optimist or a pessimist. The optimist’s view: remote learning and academic support staff that can travel with a team helps players maintain their educational pursuits during the postseason. The pessimist’s: College football stopped pretending like “getting in the way of school” was a problem a long time ago.

4. “The prolonged season without a break, without any relaxation of the players.” Schedules were very different in the ‘60s; the season started much later (Purdue’s first game in 1968 wasn’t until Sept. 21) and bye weeks weren’t used. But they were also much shorter, as teams typically only had 10 regular-season games and no conference championship to play. The modern playoff does give teams the benefit of some rest, though that’ll get more compressed with the 12-team format, where a team might have to play four postseason games in a month to win a title.

5. “I do not feel the players want another game.” Given that the players don’t have a seat on the College Football Playoff Board of Managers or any formally organized way to voice their opinions on the playoff’s structure, I have no idea if they wanted to add this many games to their season. At the very least, this is the kind of thing that a player’s union in pro sports would demand a number of concessions from ownership to sign off on, and, well, college football’s structured to make these choices without player approval.

6. “I see no equitable method to follow in picking top teams.”  Florida State fans (and plenty of others) can tell you how well we’re doing in that regard, and we’ll probably be doomed to squabbling and unfairness even as the Playoff expands. This should be easier than in Daugherty and Mollenkopf’s time, thanks to advanced analytics and the incredible ease with which anyone can watch a potential playoff team’s games. But it’s still subjective, and, unlike college tournaments in basketball, baseball, and softball, doesn’t provide at least one guaranteed path to every eligible team in the sport.

On the other hand, Byers did correctly identify one big reason to stage a playoff: TV money. When he gave the proposal preliminary approval, he made sure to point out that “the television revenue from an NCAA playoff would be tremendous. I would cut in all 120 NCAA member schools on the television receipts…it would bring each school in the NCAA at least $20,000.”

Adjusting for inflation, Byers was being too conservative. $20,000 in 1966 dollars would be just under $190,000 in 2023. The Playoff sends $300,000 to each team who meets the NCAA’s academic progress rate requirement for bowl game participation — see, no need to vote on anything, faculty — and another $300,000 to that school’s conference. Schools and conferences make a lot more if they have a team in the Playoff or the New Year’s Six bowls, naturally. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll wind up actually letting schools give some of that money to players. I suspect that part would have been fine with Byers, the man who created the legal nicety of student-athlete amateurism in his early NCAA days and then railed against it in his later years.