As Stewart Mandel likes to say, no one is in charge of college football -- and it shows. Competing interests -- schools, conferences, the bowl system, ESPN -- all looking out for themselves creates a dysfunctional system that hurts college football as a sport.
Here's a small example that proves my point.
Late last night, the Playoff finally announced the Rose Bowl will move from Pasadena to AT&T Stadium in suburban Dallas. Anyone paying attention could've seen this coming, but the issue only became serious once prominent coaches started using their sway to get the game out of an empty stadium thousands of miles from the campuses of those competing.
If college football had forward-thinking leadership, this is what would've happened.
The Cotton and Orange bowls, slated to host semifinals in the 2021 season, would've seen their spots in the semifinal rotation bumped up a year and those games would be played on Saturday, Jan. 2. Texas and Florida are the most lenient states in the union in terms of capacity at sporting events and, with the championship game set for Jan. 11 in Miami, the Orange Bowl winner could've just remained in a bubble-like environment in South Florida. There are certainly worse places to quarantine, right?
In turn, the Rose and Sugar bowls would move backward and host their semifinals on Saturday, Jan. 1, 2022. The public is accustomed to seeing college football on Saturdays and on New Year's Day, and so semifinal games on a New Year's Day Saturday, hopefully played in front of packed stadiums, would've been a picture-perfect day for the sport.
This would have been far, far better than the current plan, which is to play The Artist Formerly Known as the Rose Bowl at AT&T Stadium and keeping the 2021 semifinals where they are, which is Friday, Dec. 31.
Let me state this clearly: college football will play two of the three most important games of its season on Friday, Dec. 31, New Year's Eve. One will kick in the afternoon, when much of the country is at work, and the other in prime time, the biggest party night of the year.
No other sport would be this dumb.
No other sport would be this dumb.
No other sport would be this dumb.
The last time the CFP tried this, in 2015, the ratings were so bad -- down nearly 40 percent year over year -- that the Playoff had to immediately change its strategy for future seasons. And now here they are, set to run it back in 2021.
I know, I know. The reason none of this was possible was because of contracts, and contracts can never be broken.
But this ignores the larger point: that those contracts were written between entities -- the conferences, the bowls and ESPN -- that are all ostensibly supposed to have the game's best interests at heart.
Except they don't. Everyone looks out for themselves in college football, which leaves no one looking out for college football itself.