A not-bad path to the Playoff...for now

A good schedule is a good schedule, and while it isn’t easy to trust Nebraska given the past decade, you also have to weigh the Rhule/Year 3 thing.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

Changes are coming for the College Football Playoff. What sort of changes? The big ones—i.e. how many teams, automatic bids, changes to conference championship weekend—are still being debated with the SEC taking center stage in that discussion this week as it holds its spring meetings in Florida.

There’s every reason to believe that whatever comes out publicly from those meetings is mostly posturing or test-ballooning, but even if that’s the case it’s already been a good encapsulation of the wacky place we find ourselves in college football at the moment.

On Monday, the talk out of Destin was of the four auto-bids the SEC and Big Ten have been pushing for and how the SEC might determine its guaranteed Playoff teams if it knew four were getting in.¹ By Tuesday we heard the SEC coaches didn’t care about auto-bids and were fine with a 16-team format where only the five top-ranked conference champions were guaranteed Playoff spots.² The talk Wednesday, from those same coaches, was of their desire for a scheduling agreement with the Big Ten.

Point is, it’s “throw everything against the wall” season and, this week at least, only the SEC has the microphone. Just because it gets to flood the zone with competing ideas this week, however, doesn’t mean some of those ideas won’t eventually become standard operating procedure in the future.

But for now, we have at least one more year of the 12-team format where the best path to the Playoff is avoiding losses. Big wins are nice, of course, but is the reward worth the risk of an extra loss? It doesn’t seem like it in the current system and we know where Nebraska’s administration stands on this (for now) given it canceled the home-and-home with Tennessee.

All this idle Playoff theorizing—and it’s no accident that it’s happening during the most idle part of the college football calendar—had me thinking about a Matt Rhule quote from earlier this year: “We’ve always kind of built towards Year 3…”

There’s no disputing that based on Rhule’s Temple and Baylor tenures, but if this is the second and final year of the Playoff as we currently know it, does it increase the urgency for Year 3 to look like the year Rhule and staff have been building to at Nebraska?

I think it might.