Dear Ari: Why would anyone want the No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff?

Every Thursday, Andy and Ari On3 will have a mailbag episode as we head into the weekend’s slate. But I’ll also be doing a “Dear Ari” written mailbag on Fridays as a companion to the show. 

Let’s get started with the first edition:  

From MagnetsAreFun on Reddit:
The No. 5 seed gets a practice game at home and then gets the lowest ranked auto bid with a first-round bye. The No. 1 seed gets the winner of No. 8 and No. 9, which is probably going to be ranked higher. Why would a team want the No. 1 seed?

The obvious short answer: Playing less games is better? But I’m with you. If you gave truth serum to head coaches and asked if they’d want to play an overmatched Group of 5 team (instead of a bye) in exchange for an easier path to the final four — like avoiding a game with an Alabama-like team who dropped two games on a tough schedule and is the No. 8 seed — they’d probably take the extra game. It’s a tough situation. 

I do like the idea of re-seeding as a concept, but the problem with the new College Football Playoff is it’s very hard to predict where the really good teams you want to avoid are going to be ranked year to year. 

If we instituted a re-seeding system, there would be years where the top seed would be re-seeded into an even harder matchup. There is no steadfast rule we could put in place to ensure the No. 1 seed has the easiest path every single year. Heck, we’re two years removed from the Big 12 Champion playing for a national title in the four-team era. 

We can live under the assumption that the Big 12 Champion is going to be the easiest game among all the conference champion byes, but that’s also not going to be true every year. Things change.

This system sets up nicely for Notre Dame, a team I think has a legit chance of going undefeated this season and enjoy the benefits of that. They would play the No. 5 seed in that scenario and play a Group of 5 team instead of a conference title game, then (likely) be matched up with the Big 12 champ, another very winnable game for The Irish. 

I wouldn’t hate discussing a world where the committee is in charge of seeding the games with the mission of making sure the easiest path is always with the No. 1 seed. Every year, they could be in charge of ranking/seeding things appropriately, but even that people would go nuts with what they came up with. There’s no boilerplate solution that doesn’t involve changing the entire system.

The good news? If we get Georgia-Alabama in the second round, we’re getting better football games, right? Isn’t that the No. 1 selling point for this whole system? More competitive football games and a more unpredictable final four? The byproduct of this system is just going to be some teams get jobbed and some teams get a great draw. That’s true in the NCAA Tournament, too. 

Seeding was a tough situation in the four-team field, too. Do you think Georgia was amped up about playing Ohio State instead of Michigan or TCU in the first round of the four-team field two years ago? Probably not. But then the reward for getting through that (after nearly losing) was playing a TCU team in which it was favored by three scores. 

We’re talking about the national championship of college football. It’s supposed to be really, really hard to win it all. And one of the things I’ll miss the most about the four-team era is the debates we’d have about who should get in and who should be left out. Now we’ll get debates about seeding, which won’t hit as hard because the stakes aren’t nearly as high, but they are still really important. 

My question back to you would be how do we fix this? 

I don’t see an easy solution. 

From Dissident_Is_Here on Reddit :
Hi Ari, with Florida State not making the playoff last year despite being undefeated, do you think your take that “the regular season is the playoff” was wrong? And do you still think, with what is shaping up to be an incredible year in CFB with so many teams in the hunt, that playoff expansion was a mistake?

I was steadfastly against the expansion of the College Football Playoff to 12 teams. I think it undermines the regular season, which, in my opinion, was the Playoff. People say we’ll have more games at the end of the season that matter, which is true. But we’ll also have less games at the beginning of the season that matter now. It’s not more games that’ll matter, it’s just changing when they have to matter. Also, we had a hard enough time trying to find four good teams in the previous CFP era and now we’re doing 12?

But because Florida State got screwed in a way we had never seen before last year, it begrudgingly made me have to change my stance. I don’t want to live in a world where many regular season losses don’t matter like we do now, but I really, really don’t want to live in a world where undefeated power conference champions get left out of the postseason, regardless of circumstance. 

Neither system was perfect. I think there are consequences to the new system that we don’t fully appreciate yet. But, at the vary least, I think we won’t be left with “what-if?” questions once all the games have been played, which is great.

What happened to Florida State last year was a travesty and I’m happy this new system — which I still believe is deeply flawed — will help us avoid that. 

From @Cfbtalk07 on Twitter :
How do you stay in love with a sport that outside people are trying to kill? 

If you listened to Wednesday’s show, you know I’m also having a hard time with this. 

On one hand, the dysfunction of the sport is wildly entertaining. There is no topic in college football that drives more eyeballs than realignment. People are addicted to the drama NIL-related topics bring. In a sport where discussion and arguments are at the core of its beauty, that seems positive? 

But on the other hand, does anyone really like realignment? Are people happy the Pac-12 doesn’t exist? Are people pleased that there are colleges on the Pacific Coast in the Atlantic Coastal Conference? Do people love concerning themselves with how much money collectives are spending or watching the best players in the portal make financial decisions? Do people love the 12-team College Football Playoff field? 

That all depends on who you ask. I can comfortably say that nobody is jumping up and down and cheering for the demise of the regionality of this sport. Where you stand on NIL is a mixed bag. Where you stand on the expanded CFP is also a mixed bag. 

That doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting or that we shouldn’t crave coverage of those topics. They are all essential topics in regard to understanding how this sport works and where it’s headed. 

The main draw of this whole thing are the games. 

There has been more evolution in this sport in the past three years than the previous 50 combined. That is turbulent. And the most disconcerting thing about that evolution is that none of it was done to make the product better or to enhance the experience for the consumer. It is about squeezing out every possible dollar there is to be made off of the fans and the sport is indestructible because they know fans will never, ever stop watching.

My advice? Remember that as long as games are played on Saturday, people are going to care. College football, as I’ve had to remind myself, is an unbreakable entity. Are there things I’d like to hit the rewind button on? Sure. But when I wake up on Saturday mornings, I’m just as fired up to watch the games as I ever have been in the past. 

So pour yourself into your team. Live and die by recruiting wins and losses and triumphs and failures on the field. Listen to college football shows and consume the written work. This is an entertainment product, and bogging yourself down on the things you don’t like takes away from the experience of just being a fan. 

Love football. Love your team. Stay engaged. 

From dgill5581 on Reddit :
What are your thoughts on the pervasiveness of sports gambling? As someone who has never put money on a game, I find the constant ads by DraftKings, MGM Grand, ESPN Bet, FanDuel, among others, to be kind of annoying. I enjoy the debates over point spreads, O/U, etc to be entertaining but do you see any issue with how prevalent this industry is becoming?

Also worth noting my favorite podcasts episodes, from a purely entertainment perspective, are often the ones where you’ve lost sums of money on MACtion games 

Thanks for reveling in my pain. 

To answer your question, I think sports gambling is more prevalent than people think, especially now. It’s something I very much enjoy, but I also can understand why someone who doesn’t engage in it doesn’t want to spend a ton of time worried about the spreads or total numbers. 

The one thing I’ll tell you: even if you don’t bet, the gambling angles really do provide a key into understanding the games better. It does help us contextualize the games much better because the numbers are a crucial guideline for what to expect out of matchups. I think you can gain a lot of knowledge about football in general, even if you’re consuming a gaming segment without participating.

I’m thankful for our partnership with Prize Picks, and the numbers they come up with in their squares often help us tell the story of the upcoming games. You don’t have to partake in the application to enjoy what the numbers tell us.