Rece Davis pushes back on auto-bids in College Football Playoff

The first College Football Playoff rankings of the season were released on Tuesday. A particularly momentous event with this season being the first where the College Football Playoff field is being expanded to 12 teams.

Long before the first 12-team playoff even kicked off, there were conversations about the playoff field expanding to even more teams. Which could likely come with even more automatic bids beyond the current four Power Four champions receiving a first-round bye. A notion that college football analyst Rece Davis is not a fan of.

“My personal take is I don’t like it. I want college football as a whole to be evaluated, the divide is happening automatically,” Davis said on the College GameDay Podcast. “We don’t need to manufacture this divide.”

“I mean, I cannot conceive of a world with the way the power is structured, and the size of the two leagues, and the teams involved in those two if you expand to 14 or to 16 (teams), that they’re not getting that anyway,” Davis added about the SEC and the Big Ten. “So why not leave it the way it is in the hands of a committee to decide?”

Talks of an expanded College Football Playoff have been followed by reports of the SEC and Big Ten seeking out four automatic bids each following further expansion. But Davis supports the way the College Football Playoff Committee has been going about business, especially compared to adding more automatic bids to the table.

“I like the committee, I think the committee does a good job. They’re not perfect and there are decisions over the years that you can disagree with and have a reasonable difference of opinion. Reasonable minds can differ,” Davis said. “So I’m in favor of the committee and not putting constraints on them by saying, ‘Okay, we start after we have these two leagues fill their automatic bids.’

“Because look at the tiebreakers that we’re already dealing with potentially in some of the conferences about who might make the conference championship game.”

The current CFP structure paired with the nationwide conference expansion has made the Power Four conferences bigger and stronger. Also making who advances to their coveted conference title games for a chance to punch a ticket to the playoff more challenging to sort out with potential tiebreakers. Chaos Davis would prefer over several teams automatically making it to the College Football Playoff.

“I was asking about the Big 12 last night and they’re at, I want to say, tiebreaker three, subsection D, and seeing what order the teams finish, and how did you do against them, and counting down. You’re getting down all of these crazy tie-breakers anyway, why not instead of having it like that, and it might be a little random in there, why not have people with football judgment helping you make those decisions?” Davis asked.

The future of the College Football Playoff and potential changes will be fascinating to track, but for now fans and analysts alike can sick back and enjoy how the latest and greatest format unfolds on and off the field.