College Football Playoff expansion: Josh Pate criticizes latest Big Ten proposal to 28 teams

News emerged Saturday that the Big Ten was “populating” an idea to expand the College Football Playoff, potentially to as many as 24 or 28 teams. It created shockwaves in the sport.

But noted college football analyst Josh Pate is calling the Big Ten’s bluff. He believes that was all about resetting the parameters of the discussion to make a 16-team automatic qualifying model of the College Football Playoff more palatable to the general public.

Hate the new suggestion enough and the old one starts to look more reasonable. Pate explained on Josh Pate’s Football Show on Sunday night.

“This isn’t going to happen, that’s the good news,” Pate said. “There is one goal here. To explain the whole Big Ten playoff expansion proposal nonsense, the goal is not for them to get to a 24- or a 28-team playoff. The goal is to leak that so that they can actually get to what they want, which is the 16-team model.”

Pate pulled up a visual of what a 28-team College Football Playoff would have looked like last season. It featured a handful of out-there matchups, including Alabama against Army in the first round.

Is that going to make more people tune in? Fat chance.

Worse, Pate warned, it would fundamentally alter one of college football’s greatest assets: the regular season. He broke it down.

“So I need to say something and I’m going to try to be respectful about it because at the end of the day we all have opinions on sports and it’s not the end of the world,” Pate said. “We can go our separate ways. Or we can agree to disagree and go a similar way and go to lunch neat together.

“If you think that’s good for college football, you and I don’t see the same sport the same way. We’re not looking through the same world view, magnifying glass lens, at college football. This wouldn’t even be awesome as a stand-alone product, much less awesome attached to the regular season because of obviously what it does to the regular season.”

What an expanded version of the College Football Playoff would do, essentially, is simply shift where the meaningful games are being played. Instead of major importance being attached to games like a one-loss Ohio State and a one-loss Michigan, it would shift down the line toward, say, a four-loss Iowa State and a five-loss UCF.

As Pate pointed out, there are only a handful of teams actually capable of winning it all in any given year. Shifting meaning further down the line with an expanded College Football Playoff isn’t necessarily providing more value. At all.

“There are some smart people who could look at that and they could say, ‘Aw, who says no to more football?'” Pate said. “The same people who like having money but they say no to endlessly printing money. Because when you endlessly print money you devalue the money.

“When you love football but then you play endless amounts of football, especially in consequence type situations like playoff spots being on the line, you devalue the actual regular season of football. And there happen to be some of us who believe that the regular season of college football is the best thing about college football. Many people think that.

“So when you suggest that we play 37 playoff games at the end just because it’s more games, that’s dumb.”