College Football Playoff: Michael Wilbon calls ESPN out for 'greed' in 12-team format

ESPN’s Michael Wilbon called out his own network for greed when it comes to the College Football Playoff.

Now that we’re two rounds into this year’s iteration, Wilbon saw enough and said the CFP does not need 12 teams. He’d much prefer an eight team bracket with no byes.

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But the powers that be won’t do that due to financial incentive and Wilbon wasn’t afraid to call out his own bosses.

“They’re not going to go from 12 to eight because this is a greed play,” Wilbon said on Pardon The Interruption. “It’s a money play for everybody, including this network.”

Some have lauded the amount of teams, in this case 12, for the playoff. The conversation only shifted to who actually deserved to be in the 12-team playoff.

“12 is too many, and I’m going to disagree with people who are true experts, many of them colleagues and many of them friends on this network who’ve been talking all day, and they all bless 12,” Wilbon said. “And I’m sorry I’m not going to bless 12. It needs to be an eight-team tournament. Here’s one of the reasons why it needs to be eight. First of all, college kids don’t need to play 16 or 17 games in a season. That’s heinous. 

“Now secondly, if you have eight, you don’t have byes. You don’t need byes. The teams that have byes got beat, and they were rusty. Oregon. Come on, Oregon doesn’t deserve that fate. You don’t need byes. Get in with eight.” 

Wilbon also took issue with the seeding, saying the bye week was detrimental to the teams that were off from the first round.

“You seed them one through eight, addressing another one of your issues,” Wilbon said. “And you put those eight teams out there, and you say let’s go. The teams that were resting Tony, they’re at a disadvantage. They hadn’t played in a month. Notre Dame played last week. Ohio State played like 10 days earlier, not been off for like 26 days. 

“So no, that’s a disadvantage. If you have a bye, you don’t want to have a disadvantage. They can fix the sending. Just fix it.”

Co-host Tony Kornheiser didn’t hate 12 like Wilbon, nor call ESPN greedy. But surely he noted ESPN and others’ SEC preference.

“I don’t hate it,” Kornheiser said to Wilbon. “I just think it needs adjusting. I think one of the things that we saw is it belies the fact that the SEC is by far the best conference. That’s not true. Tennessee went out in their first game. Georgia went out in their first game. Texas is in but they’re not really an SEC team yet … And Alabama lost to Michigan, in a bowl game so I don’t want to hear any more about how they got hosed by the committee.”