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Mike Elko pushes back on regular season games meaning less with expanded playoff

IMG_6598by:Nick Kosko•10/22/24•

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Mike Elko pushes back on regular season games meaning less with expanded playoff
Maria Lysaker-Imagn Images.

Mike Elko seems to love the 12-team College Football Playoff and the way it puts importance on more games throughout the regular season.

Texas A&M hosts LSU this weekend with both teams coming in at 6-1 and the loser could very well be on the outside looking in when it comes to the playoff. But they’re not necessarily out of it.

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So Elko pushed back on the idea that the expanded playoff diminished any meaning to regular season games.

“I don’t know that internally we ever thought that,” Elko said. “I thought it would be the exact opposite. I thought there would be more teams playing more meaningful games. I think as you talk to your teams in your programs you’re seeing, like, more coaches reference it, you know, because when it was a four-team (playoff), I was talking to somebody about this a couple weeks ago. 

“One of the TV crews, like, when it was a four-team playoff, you basically went into the season kind of prepared on how you were going to get knocked out of the playoff race early, and you had to keep going right? And so you kind of never talked about it because you were so far removed from being in a four-team playoff race.”

Texas A&M is currently No. 14 in the AP Poll and LSU is No. 8. Both are squarely in the mix when it comes to playoff projections.

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Elko likes it that way so he knows there are plenty of implications this weekend. In year’s past, both of these teams might already be out of it, depending upon other results.

“Now that you’re at 12 and you’re talking about 24, 26, 28 teams still viably alive to find a way into the 12,” Elko said. “And so now it becomes a little bit more like you lose a game early, you can still keep your goals or playoff hopes are still in front of that. Just you see a little bit more of that, that verbiage and rhetoric being used. And so I think there’s more teams that are still alive. I think there’s probably teams in the SEC, maybe more, that are still alive to be in the playoff that’s never really been the case in previous years. 

“And so, yeah, I think it puts a lot of magnitude, you know, on a lot of different games. You look even at Alabama-Missouri this weekend. Right? That’s almost a similar type of game in terms of playoff importance. This game has tremendous playoff importance. And so I just think you see those more and more.”