Joel Klatt's radical conference championship change to increase marquee games

Joel Klatt and I don’t always agree. Those who attended the combined Big 12/Big Ten/Pac-12/Mountain West meetings a few years ago in Scottsdale, Ariz., might remember a fairly animated discussion between us in the lobby about how SEC teams get evaluated. You probably can guess who was on which side.

I love arguing with Klatt, though. Few people think as deeply and as creatively about the sport as the minor league baseball player-turned-Colorado quarterback-turned Fox broadcaster. He’s done his homework, and his ideas about the sport come from a place of pure love.

So when Klatt says there is a way to pack even more good games into a college football season, we probably should listen. “I don’t think people quite realize the amount of inventory we leave on the floor in college football,” Klatt said on Thursday’s episode of Andy and Ari On3. “It’s staggering.”

What Klatt means is the previous iterations of the chase for a national champion incentivized scheduling terrible games, and that has infected the sport for decades. Because pollsters in the BCS era and the College Football Playoff selection committee in the CFP era ranked teams almost exclusively by the loss column and didn’t care as much about the quality of their wins, the sport evolved in a way where fans believed that only an undefeated team was worthy of playing for a national title.

The first season of megaconferences and a 12-team CFP has shown us the fallacy of that thinking. Good teams lose sometimes. We’re about to watch a Notre Dame team that lost at home to Northern Illinois and an Ohio State team that suffered loss No. 2 at the hands of five-loss Michigan play for the national title. Do they deserve to be there? Absolutely. Because both of them got there by winning three games in a row against some of the best teams in the country. Had the four-team CFP remained in place and the committee voted exactly like it did at the end of the season, neither would have even made the field.

What Klatt suggests is an even more audacious playoff format that could add even more meaningful games to the end of the regular season. It probably would add losses for some of the best teams, too. But it’s probably time that everyone comes to grips that we’re not going to see many undefeated national champs from this point forward because — if we’re lucky — schedules won’t be bogged down with as much chum as they used to be.

Klatt would love a nationalized scheduling system that takes out-of-conference scheduling out of the hands of individual athletic directors. That way more power conference teams would play fun intersectional games in their non-conference schedules. He wants the ACC and SEC to play nine conference games like everyone else. (A number of SEC ADs agree because that would sell more tickets, but the league has understandably cooled on that idea because Disney/ESPN hasn’t offered more money for the extra conference games while Big Ten schools have been paid gobs of money by Fox, NBC and CBS for a comparable product.) 

But even if that doesn’t happen, Klatt has an idea that would provide a more clear and less subjective path into the CFP. In the process, it would add some potentially thrilling games.

Here’s the idea:

Expand the CFP to 14 and create an automatic bid structure that looks like this.

• Four Big Ten teams
• Four SEC teams
• Two ACC teams
• Two Big 12 teams
• The highest ranked champion of the other leagues
• One at-large, which could go to an eligible independent such as Notre Dame

This is the structure preferred by Big Ten leaders. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has long resisted guaranteeing spots to certain conferences and not others because he believes it opens up the CFP to an antitrust challenge. And he may be correct. It’s possible neither the ACC nor the Big 12 would agree to this. It’s also possible the Mountain West, Sun Belt, or another league might threaten to sue. 

But it’s also possible that if those leagues feel they’re compensated fairly by the system, they’ll go along with pretty much anything.

Klatt’s reasoning for the more rigid structure is to explicitly create paths within the power conferences to make the CFP. The vitriol of the arguments this past month led him down this path. When the CFP bracket was revealed, Indiana received an inordinate amount of hate for making the field at 11-1 (with a fairly easy non-conference and Big Ten schedule) when several 9-3 SEC teams (which played more difficult schedules) were left out.

So Klatt reasoned that it’s possible to have defined criteria for making the CFP from those leagues, which eliminates the argument. Even though the Buccaneers lost at home to the Commanders this past weekend, no one argued the legitimacy of Tampa Bay’s playoff berth or home game. The Bucs won the NFC South, and the NFL’s rules state that division winners who aren’t the No. 1 seed host on Wild Card weekend. 

In Klatt’s plan, the Big Ten and SEC would stage championship games that match the teams that finished first and second in the conference standings. Those teams all would make the CFP, and the winners of each league would receive a first-round bye. (They would host a game because the second round also would be on campus.) On the same day No. 1 and No. 2 play for the title, No. 3 would face No. 6 and No. 4 would face No. 5. The winners of those games would make the CFP.

This past season, Iowa would have played at Indiana and Illinois would have played at Ohio State in the Big Ten. The SEC didn’t use its rules to break its ties past No. 1 and No. 2, so we’ll have to use this Reddit thread to determine that LSU would have played at Tennessee and Alabama would have played at Ole Miss. The winners would have made the tournament. It’s a testament to how grossly oversized the conferences are now that none of these would have been rematches of regular-season games.

Those games would have been tremendous. Instead of arguing hypotheticals, Alabama would have had to win in Oxford to make the field. Indiana, which did benefit from a weak Big Ten schedule, would have had to beat a team that went 6-3 in Big Ten play. 

Meanwhile, the ACC and Big 12 wouldn’t stage conference title games but instead a pair of play-in games that match No. 4 at No. 1 and No. 3 at No. 2. In the ACC, Syracuse would have played at SMU and Miami would have played at Clemson. The winners would have made the field.

In the Big 12, perhaps the most evenly matched conference at the top of the league, Colorado would have played at Arizona State and BYU would have played at Iowa State. The Iowa State-Arizona State title game in JerryWorld was fine, but I’d rather see Travis Hunter against Cam Skattebo in Tempe with a postseason berth on the line and then another game with similar stakes featuring a duel between Jake Retzlaff and Rocco Becht.

My co-host Ari Wasserman points out that all this does is effectively create a 22-team playoff. That’s semantics, especially if we’re already considering critical late-season games to be playoff games. What it would do is generate serious excitement among fanbases whose teams enter November with a chance to make those play-in games.

What it wouldn’t do is spark online name-calling because someone thought one SEC team should have gotten in over a particular Big Ten team. It would not cause SEC ADs to threaten to schedule crappier non-conference games as they did after this season. (Even though in-conference losses were what knocked them out.) The path would be defined, and the teams that got in would be in because they won enough in the regular season to make the play-ins, and then they won the play-ins.

We’d still get to argue our faces off about seeding, but the dumbest arguments would be put to bed, instead replaced by more fun, high-stakes games.