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The CFB Playoff Reveal Show was Terrible, but it was Great News for Kentucky

Nick-Roush-headshotby:Nick Roush12/08/24

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College Football Playoff logo CFB Playoff
College Football Playoff logo, via Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

Wow. That was something. The first-ever 12-team CFB Playoff bracket was revealed on ESPN and that was one hour of my life that I will never get back.

The CFB Playoff Bracket Reveal Show was terrible when there were four teams in the field. It somehow got worse when they added eight more.

Booger McFarland is still spewing nonsense. Joey Galloway won’t let his bad take — Indiana should have benched Kurtis Rourke vs. Ohio State — fade into oblivion. Nick Saban has been outstanding on television, except when he talks in circles about strength of schedule to defend Alabama.

Those gasbags aren’t what makes the show bad. What makes the show bad is they don’t talk about the CFB Playoff games.

CBS cracked the code years ago. Here are the one-seeds, now let’s show you who’s playing. It’s not that hard. One year they tried to change things and college basketball fans rioted. That experiment only lasted one year.

College basketball’s Selection Sunday special lasts 30 minutes and you can immediately begin filling in a bracket. It took 30 minutes for ESPN to share who got byes. Then 15 more to reveal the rest of the field. While showing one more side-by-side of SMU and Alabama, Rece Davis acknowledged, “I don’t mean to drag this out,” all while dragging it out even further.

The length of the CFB Playoff Bracket Reveal Show is not the only thing that makes it terrible. College basketball’s Selection Sunday is a celebration of what’s to come in March Madness. Rather than focusing on the teams that made it, ESPN prioritized the teams that didn’t make the final cut, which is actually great news for Kentucky fans.

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The Consequences of Alabama’s CFB Playoff Absence

Folks, we might just get to keep playing the Governor’s Cup after all.

When Oklahoma and Texas were added to the SEC, there was a push to increase the number of SEC games per year from eight to nine. A coalition led by Mitch Barnhart and Mark Stoops pushed against that at the Spring Meetings. The argument was made under the guise of protecting inter-conference rivalry games, but let’s be honest with one another. Kentucky has a hard enough time with an 8-game SEC schedule. Adding another could be devastating.

Coaches and administrators ultimately decided to table the discussion for two years for two reasons. One, ESPN wasn’t going to pay the SEC more money to play more SEC games. Two, no one in the SEC knew how the CFB Playoff Committee would act in a 12-team format.

Nick Saban turned the tide, no pun intended, by siding with Stoops and getting everyone to agree to play the waiting game and temporarily stick with an 8-game SEC schedule. The first thing Saban said on ESPN after the results were revealed was to question why Alabama should play non-conference games against Notre Dame and Ohio State when the CFB Playoff Committee is not incentivizing teams to play a challenging schedule.

The first 12-team CFB Playoff has given the SEC a good reason to stick with an 8-game league schedule for the foreseeable future.

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2025-01-29