Mack Brown details biggest concern with College Football Playoff changes

Mack Brown has seen and coached through plenty of major changes during his career in college football. Since leading Tulane in the mid-1980s to his second stint coaching North Carolina these days, Brown has seen polls, computers and now a playoff help crown a national champion.

With imminent expansion of the College Football Playoff from four to 12 teams in coming years, Brown has concerns, namely with the way decisions are being made and changes are being implemented. Much like the implementation of the transfer portal and NIL — two favorite boogeymen for college football coaches these days — Brown thinks an expanded playoff is being rushed and there will be problems to fix down the line.

“The one thing I don’t like about what we’re doing with college football right now is there’s just some decisions being made without all the information available,” Brown said. “I thought the transfer portal — we’re trying to fix things, three years later. The NIL, we got no clue. We’re trying to fix some things there and we really don’t know what to fix. We know our problems, but we don’t have an answer, is what I can tell. And we all know we need one. And we all know there’s something that could be done, but then you get into all the political ramifications, the legal ramifications, you want players to get money but you want there to be guidelines so there doesn’t get an imbalance in recruiting for college football and ruin our game. And here we are with playoffs the same.”

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Guidelines around the transfer portal recently became clearer and NIL rules and regulations are surely on the horizon, but it’s unclear when and from who — it could be the NCAA or it could be the United States Congress.

With rapid changes still coming to the sport and the rules of engagement around player compensation morphing, Brown posed hypotheticals about how bowl payouts will get divvied among players, teams and programs.

“So we’re paying them, for NIL,” Brown said. “What happens now with playoffs? Are you going to pay 12 teams? What happens to the bowl games? Do some get incorporated into the 12 team playoff? Then what happens to the others? And people are saying now ‘Well bowl games aren’t important anymore.’ Well they are to the teams that can’t get in the playoff. Say, ‘Well some kids opt out of the bowl games.’ That’s their right, that’s their choice. And if you’re going to pay for the playoffs, are you going to start paying kids to play in bowl games?”

Brown didn’t seem upset at the idea of players getting paid for playing in these games, he mostly just wants a clearer idea of how that would work. He also acknowledged an expanded playoff means more games for some players, and in a dangerous sport like football that is no small consideration, both healthy and money-wise.

“But I think the biggest thing for me, with the playoff, will be making sure that we take care of the players and the parents. Because we’re going to ask them to be out there longer, football’s a dangerous sport. We’re going to ask them to play more,” Brown said.

There were plenty more hypotheticals from Brown during the roughly five minutes he spent holding court about the issue. A good number have available answers while others — “What happens to FCS? They need money. Do they still play, does Western Carolina still play Carolina?” — are less clear (and likely vary from school to school in regards to scheduling FCS teams).

Brown admitted he doesn’t have solutions ready for a lot of these problems, and his ire seems to come from the fact that he doesn’t think anyone else thought to have one, either.

“So there’s so many questions that I don’t have answered, that I would have liked to have had those answered before we just started making decisions again,” Brown said. “But that seems to be what we’re doing — we’re making decisions and we’re fixing them.”