Presumably, college sports will someday diverge far enough from what it once was that fans will finally say they’ve had enough.
Maybe when 28-year-old “grad students” on their seventh school wear uniforms with their agent’s phone number on their name plates or coaches switch jobs at halftime after vowing in a first-quarter sideline interview, “I swear on my mama’s grave that I will never leave State U.”
But here’s betting that even this week’s ridiculousness won’t keep us from continuing to scarf it up like underfed hamsters.
Tuesday, the American Football Coaches Association announced its support for expanding the playoffs, potentially to 24 teams. The Big Ten has led the 24-team cause, also reportedly the preferred model of the ACC, Big 12 and Notre Dame. (The SEC, a pillar of restraint, favors 16 teams.)
Thursday, the NCAA announced its plan to increase the Division I men’s and women’s basketball tournaments from 68 to 76 teams.
The AFCA recommendation doesn’t make it official, but it’s an indicator that we’re headed toward 24 (as opposed to 16). It would further reduce the importance of the regular season, which has forever been one of the best things about college football, and also eliminate conference championship games to make room for the extra playoff round. The proposal also calls for the CFP championship to be played by the second Monday of January for the purposes of the transfer portal.
The basketball change will add teams that will have little chance of winning and, more importantly, won’t deserve inclusion.
Both are lacking from the perspectives of making logical sense and what fans say they want.
But what surely helped both groups cement their decisions was their confidence that they will make much more money for everyone. And the reason for that confidence is that TV executives trust that fans won’t turn away, regardless of their complaints.
Virtually no fan likes what the transfer portal and unlimited transfers with immediate eligibility have done to the games and teams we love. Likewise, while no one should begrudge athletes the money they make from supposed name, image and likeness deals, it has altered the character of college athletics that differentiated it from professional sports and was part of its appeal.
And yet, while fan discontent may be on the rise at tailgates, text threads and social media, you’d have a hard time convincing ESPN and other broadcast companies that it has changed viewing habits.
Fans have apparently been so fed up with the CFP expanding from four teams to 12 that they have forced themselves to watch the first-round games the past two years in protest.
“You’ll never take our freedom!” fans roared, expressing their disgust with the dilution of the regular season by refusing to turn off Alabama-Oklahoma.
Average viewership for the first round has been 10.5 million, a number that does nothing to convince TV executives that fans won’t watch even more.
From a TV perspective, doubling the field size from 12 to 24 shouldn’t change anything for the worse.
Think about it this way: Conference championship games will be replaced by eight games with more at stake, even if the first-round teams (seeded 9-24) will have little to no shot at actually winning the CFP.
Going by the final regular-season CFP rankings, Georgia Tech and BYU could have played each other in a first-round game this past season. They did play in the Pop-Tarts Bowl and it drew a viewership of 8.7 million.
How much larger would the audience have been if there was something more meaningful at stake than a trophy with a working toaster? (I recognize that some might contest that nothing is more meaningful than a trophy with a working toaster, an argument with merits.)
Face it: We may roll our eyes at a 24-team playoff, but we’re still going to watch it and we’re still going to watch regular-season games even if they matter less.
And the same goes for the NCAA Tournament.
Despite all the (valid) fan criticism that “you don’t know who’s on your team from one year to the next,” the 2026 men’s tournament averaged 10.9 million viewers, an increase of 7% from the previous season. It was the second-most-watched tournament since 1994.
Maybe fans were watching to figure out who was on their team.
The NCAA claims that it is expanding the field to give more teams the chance to participate in March Madness. The announcement didn’t mention anything about those additional teams actually being deserving.
The tournament does not need 76 teams. If this year’s men’s tournament included that many, at-large bids likely would have gone to the likes of Oklahoma — which, at one point, lost nine games in a row, and Cincinnati, which was 18-15 overall and 3-11 in Quad-1 games.
And on the topic of stupendously logic-free assertions, the AFCA endorsed expanding the playoffs while also expressing concern for the length of the season.
According to the AFCA release, in addition to another playoff round, coaches want to start the season one week earlier and restrict the number of open dates to one per season “to better serve student-athletes.”
“The leadership at Widgets Inc. is instituting a new company policy: Fewer vacation days and longer shifts. It’s because we want to better serve our employees.”
In this proposed world, assuming the playoffs would take a one-week break for Christmas, a team that has its open date the second week of the season could play 14 weeks in a row.
Why would “student-athletes” who are trying to “earn degrees” and “stay healthy” not want to sign up for that?
But if fans don’t want to be a party to that, they should not watch the first round of the 24-team CFP.
Or maybe they can show their solidarity with the athletes by watching every game to make sure they’re OK.
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