It feels like a matter of time: Players are going to opt out of the CFP

A decade ago, LSU and Alabama played a rematch for the BCS national championship, and Bill Hancock, the executive director of the BCS, had to explain why the Tigers should have to play someone they already had defeated.

“If you had a tournament,” Hancock said on KFNS Radio in St. Louis, “it’s quite likely that they’d have to beat them again.”

Nevertheless, the rematch so bothered the commissioners in the other conferences that we got a playoff out of it.

A decade later, Georgia and Alabama are playing a rematch, the first rematch in the eight seasons of the College Football Playoff, and there has been neither a hue nor a cry. More like a shrug.

“I have heard way less than a decade ago,” Hancock said Tuesday night.

College football has undergone incredible change in the past decade. Spread offenses have made 40 points and a 65 percent completion rate the measure of success. Coaches are hopping from job to job and making more money than ever — and now, thanks to the transfer portal and NIL, so are players.

What once seemed ridiculous becomes routine. Changes once viewed as heretical now are the norm. And the sport remains popular. The college football public is resilient. Fans engage when they sing their fight song and wear their colors. That is the cheat code of the sport. As long as it continues to work, college football will be fine.

That’s a good thing, because now that players opt out of bowl games to protect their financial worth, I can’t for the life of me figure out why they won’t extend the practice to the College Football Playoff in years to come.

The idea that expanding the Playoff from four teams to 12 will slow the advance of opt-outs is a leap of logic that the facts fail to support. To me, the idea of playing for a national championship is a rare opportunity bordering on the sacred. But I’m 61 and I still get goosebumps on January 1 when ESPN cameras pan from the sunny San Gabriel Mountains down to the Rose Bowl.

A decade ago, when we were appalled that LSU had to play Alabama again, we would have been equally appalled if four players had opted out of the Rose Bowl. This year, four Ohio State starters weighed the opportunity to play in Pasadena on New Year’s Day and said, “No, thanks, I’m good,” and no one went to the ramparts.

Does anyone really think the lure of a national championship ring is sufficient to prevent a college football player from opting out to protect the millions he can reap from his healthy knees and shoulders? It’s just not that hard to imagine an Alabama wide receiver Jameson Williams or a Georgia nose tackle Jordan Davis — or both — bailing on the playoff.

Don’t tell me it’s unthinkable. Don’t tell me it’s heresy. I repeat: We just watched four Ohio State players choose not to play in the Rose Bowl. Can you imagine the reaction if Chris Olave, Garrett Wilson, Nicholas Petit-Frere and Haskell Garrett had had to tell coach Woody Hayes, and not coach Ryan Day, that they opted out? Hayes, just from hearing about it, is somewhere in Heaven tearing up a yard marker.

One generation’s dream is another’s meaningless bowl game. Institutional memory is short when the institution is peopled by 18-year-olds. What do they know from history? What do they care that they are messing around with college football’s sacred Bulldogs? That’s what society requires 18-year-olds to do, whether they play football or not.

“A pretty consistent set of people are traditionalists,” Christopher Knoester, an Ohio State associate professor of sociology who teaches in the university’s Sport in Society Initiative. “They have a nostalgia for the past, and things that change are uncomfortable and challenging. Change is thought of, automatically almost, as being problematic.”

“They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.

They all laughed when UC was playoff-bound.“

Opting out sits at the collision point of two competing American cultural beliefs. On one side is the American birthright of capitalism, the belief that all of us are entitled to whatever we can earn whenever we can earn it. On the other side is the American cultural belief in teamwork. It says it right there in the Great Seal of the United States: E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one.

Flip over the back of a dollar bill and read it yourself. Oh, I forgot — no one carries cash anymore. See? We got used to that, too.

“I tend to think we need to be focused on athletes’ rights,” Knoester said. “If you’re in a financial or investing environment, the common wisdom is to avoid taking risk unless you really have to. Here in the sports setting, health risks and the risk of reducing your stock is not thought of as being appropriate. It’s thought of as being selfish.”

For years we have painted coaches who leave their teams at the drop of an eight-figure contract as selfish. If that scarlet “S” has shamed any coach into taking less money to stay where he is, it hasn’t changed many. Now we paint the players who leave their teams with the same brush, and I expect it will be just as successful at stopping players as it has been stopping coaches.

If nothing else, think of the what-ifs and the barroom arguments that these opt-outs will generate. It’s been 12 years since Texas lost to Alabama in the BCS Championship Game and Longhorn fans remain convinced that if quarterback Colt McCoy hadn’t been injured on the sixth play of the game, Texas would have won.

Even if I’m underestimating the lure of a national championship, it’s hard to believe that a player on a lower-seeded team in an expanded playoff is going to commit to play as many as four more games (teams seeded ninth through 12th would have to win four games to win the national championship). Granted, we have a four-team playoff now, and we can’t buy a competitive semifinal (three one-score semis out of 16 played), so the odds that a lower-seeded team will play four games are low. But the lure of a playoff game or two doesn’t seem any more enticing than a Rose Bowl.

Maybe the answer will be to create a playoff stipend for the players. But the top draft prospects are thinking in millions, way more than any playoff stipend that, presumably, would be the same amount given to every player. To me, it feels like a matter of time. Players are going to opt out of the College Football Playoff, sure as George Gershwin knew how to write a song. Who’s got the last laugh now?